Subteam Replacement: Problem Definition and Fast Solution

Zhaoheng Li, Xinyu Pi, Mingyuan Wu (SIGMOD SRC 2021)

Abstract

In settings such as corporate management where team structure is highly volatile and large-scale personnel changes are commonplace, the ability to simultaneously replace multiple team members in a team is highly appreciated. We define the problem of Subteam Replacement to address this observation: given a team of people embedded in a social network to complete a certain task, and a subset of members – subteam - in this team which has become unavailable, find another set of people which can perform the subteam’s role in the larger team. We propose a holistic evaluation metric and scalable solution for Subteam Replacement with strong theoretical guarantees and perform quantitative evaluations on both generated and real datasets.