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First provide a summary of the paper, and then address the following criteria: Quality, clarity, originality and significance. This paper introduces the problem of activity shaping, which is a generalization of influence maximization, and allows more elaborate goal functions. The authors use multivariate Hawkes processes as the model, and via a connection to branching processes, they manage to derive a linear connection between the exogenous activity (i.e. the part that can be easily manipulated via incentives) and the overall network activity. This connection can be used in a convex optimization problem, to derive the necessary incentives to reach a global activity pattern in the network. The paper is clearly written, it contains original research, and it is potentially a very significant contribution in the field of influence maximization.