News

• U Kang and Babis Tsourakakis: ICDM'09 Best Application Paper Award Runner Up
  13 Nov, 2009
  SCS graduate students U Kang and Babis Tsourakakis attracted the 'best applications paper award' (runner up), in ICDM'09, one of the top data mining conferences, for their paper PEGASUS: A Peta-Scale Graph Mining System - Implementation and Observations by U Kang, Charalampos (Babis) Tsourakakis, and Christos Faloutsos ICDM 2009, Miami FL. The paper was selected among 70 accepted papers, out of a total of 786 submissions, and it showed how to use 'hadoop' and Yahoo's M45 machine, to analyze one of the largest publicly available graphs (over 100Gb). Moreover, the paper has been invited for fast-track possible publication to the KAIS journal.
  Congratulations, U and Babis!
• Leman Akoglu wins 'best paper' award in PKDD09
  24 Sep, 2009
  We are delighted to announce that Leman AKOGLU attracted the Best Knowledge Discovery Paper award in PKDD 2009, out of 105 papers that were accepted in the conference, and out 422 submissions. The paper was also accepted for publication in the Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery journal, for the ECML PKDD 2009 special issue.
  
  The paper is titled RTG: A Recursive Realistic Graph Generator using Random Typing by Leman Akoglu and Christos Faloutsos, ECML PKDD, Bled, Slovenia, Sep. 2009. ECML/PKDD is one of the top data mining conferences. The paper presents an intuitive and fast method of generating realistic graphs. It also proves analytically or empirically that the generated graphs match 11 properties of real graphs, making it the most realistic generator so far.
  Congratulations, Leman!
• Fan's paper among the best in this year's KDD!
  8 Jun, 2009
  "BBM: Deriving Click Models from Petabyte-scale Data" in KDD'09, by Chao Liu, Fan Guo, Christos Faloutsos is selected as one of the best in this year's KDD, and invited for fast-track journal publication. KDD and ACM-TKDD are, respectively, the premier conference and journal for data mining. The paper analyzed unprecedented volumes of click-stream data, and discovered methods to do better ranking of search results. Fan, a PhD student in SCS, did this work during his summer internship at MSR last year, under the guidance of Dr. Chao Liu.
  Congratulations, Fan!
• Leman's paper among the best in ECML/PKDD'09
  6 Jun, 2009
  The paper RTG: A Recursive Realistic Graph Generator using Random Typing by Leman Akoglu and Christos Faloutsos was accepted to ECML/PKDD'09, and, as one of the best 14 papers, is invited for immediate journal publication, out of 422 submissions and 105 acceptances. Leman is a PhD student in SCS, and ECML/PKDD is one of the top conferences in data mining. The paper describes a simple, intuitive mechanism to generate realistic graphs, and it shows that the resulting graphs obey numerous of the patterns observed in real graphs.
  Congratulations Leman!
• Jure wins the ACM SIGKDD Dissertation Award!
  21 May, 2009
  Prof. Jure Leskovec wins the prestigious ACM SIGKDD dissertation award! Jure defended his dissertation in MLD in September of 2009. The title is "Dynamics of Large Networks", describing numerous, surprising patterns that hold for real graphs, as well as several powerful tools to study blogs, instant-message networks social networks like LinkedIn, and other types of real graphs. ACM SIGKDD is the premier society for data mining research, and the above award is the highest distinction for a Ph.D. dissertation in the area. The award, which constitutes a $2,500 honorarium and a plaque, will be presented during the opening ceremonies at the upcoming SIGKDD Conference in Paris, Sunday, June 28. Jure will have 15 minutes during the ceremony to present a summary of his work.
  Congratulations Jure!
• Polo wins Yahoo KSC Program Award
  15 Apr, 2009
  Mr. Polo Chau wins a Yahoo Key Technical Challenge grant! The grant is awarded to a limited number of exceptional Ph.D. students and it carries a gift of $5,000 unrestricted funds to support their research activities. The award also includes an exclusive invitation to the KSC graduate student Summit, where Polo will have the chance to get feedback and interact with some of the best Yahoo scientists.
  
  Congratulations, Polo!
• Polo wins 2009 Symantec Fellowship!
  9 Feb, 2009
  Mr. Duen Horng (Polo) CHAU wins a 2009 Symantec Fellowship, second year in a row!
  Polo is in the MLD PhD program, working on visualization and anomaly detection for large graphs. The Symantec Graduate Fellowship program was established to identify and support exceptional graduate students who are investigating novel ways to solve real-world problems in protecting security and availability. In addition to the financial support, Polo will have the opportunity to work directly with Symantec’s top researchers on new investigations and will also have access to security insight from Symantec’s global intelligence network via the option of a summer internship
  
  Congratulations, Polo!
• Babis' paper among the best in ICDM'08
  28 Jan, 2009
  Charalampos (Babis) Tsourakakis had a paper that was invited for fast-track publication, as one of the best in ICDM'08. Babis is a PhD student at SCS/MLD. ICDM is one of the top data mining conferences, and the paper gives an extremely fast method (1000x faster) to compute triangles in social networks. The details of the paper are "Fast Counting of Triangles in Large Real Networks, without counting: Algorithms and Laws" by Charalampos Tsourakakis ICDM '08, Pisa, Italy, Dec. 2008
  http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~ctsourak/tsourICDM08.pdf
  Congratulations, Babis!
• Jimeng Sun, SCS alumni '07, wins the prestigious 'best paper' award in ICDM'08
  7 Jan, 2009
  ICDM is one of the top data mining conferences. The paper proposed MET (Memory Efficient Tucker) decomposition, to handle large sparse tensors, a vital problem for time-evolving graphs, among other applications. The paper citation is:
  T. G. Kolda and J. Sun, "Scalable Tensor Decompositions for Multi-aspect Data Mining," in Proc. IEEE International Conference on Data Mining (ICDM), 2008.
  
  Jimeng had already attracted the 'KDD best dissertation award', for his thesis on tensors and streams.
  
  Congratulations, Jimeng!
• Jure Leskovec in the news!
  30 Aug, 2008
  SCS PhD candidate Jure Leskovec, and his MSR colleagues, studied the largest social network in published literature, the Microsoft Instant Messenger network, and found 6.6 degrees of separation, among other fascinating results. The work is mentioned in major news venues, including Washington Post, MSNBC, BBC news, Guardian, Spiegel.
  The work showed that, even in a huge network of millions of people, we still have the ``six degrees of separation' phenomenon, that Milgram observed decades ago, in a social network of about 100 people.
  
  Congratulations, Jure!
• Jimeng Sun wins runner-up for SIGKDD best dissertation award
  1 Jul, 2008
  Dr. Jimeng Sun (Ph.D. CMU-CSD 2007) attracted the runner-up award for the best SIGKDD dissertation. Jimeng's dissertation is on tensor and stream mining, proposing novel and efficient methods to handle streams of numerical data, as well as streams of graphs.
  He applied his methods on chlorine monitoring in the drinking water (joint project with Prof. Jeanne VanBriesen of CIT/CMU), on monitoring the self-star data center of PDL/CMU (with Prof. Greg Ganger and his group), and also on monitoring computer traffic (with Prof. Hui Zhang, SCS/CMU)
  Jimeng will receive a plaque and will be recognized during the award ceremonies at the upcoming ACM SIGKDD Conference in August 24-27. Furthermore, he will present his work during the conference. The ACM SIGKDD conference is the most selective and prestigious data mining conference.
  Warmest congratulations, Jimeng!
• Polo Chau attracts publicity
  23 Jun, 2008
  Polo Chau attracts publicity in popular media. WJS-online, CNN-Money, Pittsburgh Tribute-Review and others, mention Polo and the prestigious fellowship he received from Symantec. Congratulations, Polo!
• Hanghang Tong, Spiros Papadimitriou, Christos Faloutsos and colleagues win the SDM08 Best Paper Award
  1 May, 2008
  Hanghang Tong (CMU), Spiros Papadimitriou (CMU alumni), Christos Faloutsos (CMU) and colleagues win BEST PAPER AWARD at the SIAM Data Mining conference, 2008. The paper was authored by Hanghang Tong (CMU), Spiros Papadimitriou (IBM and CMU Alumni), Philip Yu (IBM) and Christos Faloutsos (CMU) with title Proximity Tracking on Time-Evolving Bipartite Graphs. SIAM-DM is one of the top data mining conferences. The work focuses on social networks, and specifically on measuring the proximity of nodes, as the networks change over time. With careful design, the proposed methods achieve up to 2 orders of magnitude faster computation over straightforward competitors. Congratulations, Hanghang, Spiros and Christos!
• Mary McGlohon wins a Yahoo Key Technical Challenge grant!
  10 Feb, 2008
  The Key Technical Challenges Program is a new Yahoo! program that provides a limited number of exceptional PhD students with $5,000 each of unrestricted funds for the support of their research activities". The award also includes an exclusive invitation to a Yahoo! organized workshop that will focus on novel disciplines and important technical challenges for the Internet research community.
• Polo Chau wins Symantec Research Labs Fellowship
  6 Feb, 2008
  Polo Chau wins a Symantec Research Labs Fellowship, for 2008-2009. The fellowship covers tuition, stipend, a laptop preloaded with Symantec software, and an invitation to spend a summer internship at the Symantec Research Labs. This dovetails perfectly with the fraud detection work that Polo did last year and attracted media attention. Congratulations, Polo! For more info on the fellowship: http://www.symantec.com/about/careers/working/graduatefellowshippgms.jsp