Abstract
Mobile phones are powerful tools to connect people. The streams of Call Detail Records (CDR's) generating from these devices provide a powerful abstraction of social interactions between individuals, representing social structures. Call graphs can be deduced from these CDRs, where nodes represent subscribers and edges represent the phone calls made. These graphs may easily reach millions of nodes and billions of edges. Besides being large-scale and generated in real-time, the underlying social networks are inherently complex and, thus, difficult to analyze. Conventional data analysis performed by telecom operators is slow, done by request and implies heavy costs in data warehouses. In face of these challenges, real-time streaming analysis becomes an ever increasing need to mobile operators, since it enables them to quickly detect important network events and optimize business operations. Sampling, together with visualization techniques, are required for online exploratory data analysis and event detection in such networks. In this chapter, we report the burgeoning body of research in network sampling, visualization of streaming social networks, stream analysis and the solutions proposed so far.