ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses published scientific and professional R&D results in the fields: young adults in European Union, social media, Big Data and behavioural theories. The goal is to analyse the technology and methodology state of the art and to assess the gap between the real life and the resulting digital models. In the EU young adults are an important population group, since it is expected that they will change the current EU environment. The social media environment hosts multiple players: individuals are provided with a wide range of intelligently managed tools for massive peer-to-peer communication. The other identified players in the social media environment are social media providers, organisations and regulators. The relations between the young adults and the social media players are particularly interesting. Big Data and predictive analytics are the current driver for the understanding of complex systems. By examining properties of huge amounts of events, models are developed that forecast the situational-based behaviour.
