The SONIC Speaker Series: Polo Chau on Oct. 7th 2015

SONIC Lab is proud to welcome Polo Chau, who will present a talk on Wednesday, October 7th, 2015 at 3:00 PM in the SONIC Lab in the Frances Searle Building 1-459. All are welcome to attend. To schedule a one-on-one meeting with Dr. Chau please schedule a time here. Please contact Meghan McCarter with any questions or comments.

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Data Mining Meets HCI: Scalable Interactive Tools for Large Graph Sensemaking

Abstract

My group at Georgia Tech innovates at the intersection of Data Mining and Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) to help people make sense of massive datasets. We combine the best from both worlds to create novel tools for billions-scale graphs. I will describe some of our latest works and ideas:

1) Attention Routing, based on anomaly detection, that draws people’s attention to interesting parts of the graph. Examples include the Polonium and Aesop malware detection technology, deployed and patented by Symantec, that unearth malware from 37 billion machine-file relationships, with up to 99% detection rate; the NetProbe system detects auction fraud on eBay and fingers bad guys by identifying their networks of suspicious transactions.

2) Mixed-initiative graph sensemaking, such as the Apolo system and the MAGE system that combines machine inference and visualization to guide the user to interactively explore large graphs.

3) Scalable analytics that leverages virtual memory to enable billion-node computation on a single PC, using simple code that outperforms state-of-the-art techniques.

Biography 

Duen Horng (Polo) Chau is an Assistant Professor at Georgia Tech’s School of Computational Science and Engineering, and an Associate Director of the MS Analytics program. Polo holds a PhD in Machine Learning and a Masters in human-computer interaction (HCI). His PhD thesis won Carnegie Mellon’s Computer Science Dissertation Award, Honorable Mention.

Polo’s research lab bridges data mining and HCI to solves large-scale, real world problems. They develop scalable, interactive, and interpretable tools for big data analytics.  Their patented Polonium malware detection technology protects 120 million people worldwide. Their auction fraud detection research was widely covered by media. Their fake review detection research received the Best Student Paper Award at the 2014 SIAM Data Mining Conference.

Polo received faculty awards from Google, Yahoo, and LexisNexis, Raytheon Faculty Fellowship, Edenfield Faculty Fellowship, Outstanding Junior Faculty Award. He is the only two-time Symantec fellow and an award-winning designer.

 

A recording of Polo Chau’s Presentation can be found here, or can be viewed below!

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