Prof. Polo Chau: Data Mining Meets HCI - Tools for Large Graphs

Full Title: Data Mining Meets HCI: Scalable, Interactive, and Comprehensible Tools for Large Graphs

Summary:

Massive datasets now arise in virtually all domains. Yet, making sense of these data remains a fundamental challenge. At the Polo Club of Data Science, we are innovating at the intersection of Data Mining and Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), to combine the best from both worlds to create novel tools for making sense of graphs with billions of nodes and edges. I will describe some of our latest works and ideas:

(1) Attention Routing, a new idea, based on anomaly detection and machine inference, that automatically draws people's attention to interesting parts of the graph, such as the Polonium technology unearths malware from 37 billion machine-file relationships; the NetProbe system fingers bad guys who commit auction fraud.

(2) Mixed-Initiative Graph Sensemaking, such as the Apolo system that combines machine inference and visualization to guide the user to interactively explore large graphs. The user gives examples of relevant nodes, and Apolo recommends which areas the user may want to see next.

(3) Minimalist graph mining, which leverages virtual memory to enable fast, scalable computation on billion-node graph on a single PC, using simple code that outperforms state-of-the-art techniques.

About the speaker: http://www.cc.gatech.edu/~dchau/

Duen Horng (Polo) Chau is an Assistant Professor at Georgia Tech's School of Computational Science and Engineering of the College of Computing, and an Adjunct Assistant Professor at the College's School of Interactive Computing. Polo received his Ph.D. from the Machine Learning Department at Carnegie Mellon University. He also received a Masters in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) from Carnegie Mellon.

Polo solves large-scale, real world problems that make impact to society. His NetProbe auction fraud detection system appeared on The Wall Street Journal, CNN, TV and radio. His patented Polonium malware detection technology (with Symantec) protects 120 million people worldwide.

Polo’s thesis work won Carnegie Mellon's School of Computer Science Distinguished Dissertation Award, Honorable Mention. Polo is the only two-time Symantec fellow. He received a Yahoo! Key Scientific Challenges Award. He contributes to the PEGASUS peta-scale graph mining that won an Open Source Software World Challenge Silver Award. Polo is also an award-winning designer. He designed Carnegie Mellon's ID card.