Finding rising stars in heterogeneous social networks

A rising star is an individual who shows the potential to become a star in the near future. We investigate the problem of finding rising stars when heterogeneous data sources are available to define the same person. The proposed solution examines multiple data sources to determine how the importance of an individual improves over time. Scores from different data sources are combined using a multi-objective optimization approach, as well as a rank aggregation approach. Compared with existing methods, our approach identifies rising stars with higher h-index, number of papers and citation count in the academic domain. Further, we show that the new approach can also be applied to other data sources such as the Information Security Stack Exchange question answer forum.