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Title: Empowering People with Knowledge: The Next Frontier for Web Search
Abstract:
The Web is continuing to evolve at a rapid pace, with the emergence of cloud computing promising to create
a new platform for software development and service delivery. One of the greatest opportunities of this new
era is the cultivation of a developer ecosystem that can produce millions of micro-vertical services and
applications, working together to serve each and every user information need. In this new world, there is
an opportunity to build a more powerful and intelligent search engine that both understands what users are
trying to accomplish and co-operates with users as they learn, make decisions and take actions. In this
talk, I will first discuss some significant trends in cloud computing, before sharing my thoughts on how we
can leverage these trends to create both innovative and disruptive technologies for Web search.
Biography:
Dr. Wei-Ying Ma is an Assistant Managing Director at Microsoft Research Asia where he oversees multiple
research groups including Web Search and Data Mining, Natural Language Computing, and Human Computer Interaction.
Over the years, under his leadership, Wei-Ying's team of researchers have been recognized as one of the
global powerhouses in search, data mining, and multimedia information retrieval related research. The team
transferred key technologies into Microsoft's search and online service products. In addition, they
published extensively at major conferences such as the SIGIR, WWW, and ACM Multimedia.
Before joining Microsoft in 2001, Wei-Ying was with HP Labs in Palo Alto, California where he worked in the
fields of multimedia adaptation and distributed media services infrastructure. From 1994 to 1997, Wei-Ying
was engaged in the Alexandria Digital Library project at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
During this time, he developed one of the first web-based image-retrieval systems, Netra, which is regarded
as one of the most influential image retrieval systems.
As an active member of the research community, Wei-Ying has published more than 250 papers at international
conferences. He currently serves on the editorial boards of ACM Transactions on Information System (TOIS)
and ACM/Springer Multimedia Systems Journal. In recent years, he served as program co-chair of WWW 2008,
program co-chair of PCM 2007, general co-chair of AIRS 2008, and general co-chair of MMM 2005.
Wei-Ying received a bachelor of science in electrical engineering from the National Tsing Hua University in
Taiwan in 1990. He earned a Master of Science degree and doctorate in electrical and computer engineering
from the University of California at Santa Barbara in 1994 and 1997, respectively.
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Title: Game Theoretic Approaches to Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining
Abstract:
Game theory is replete with brilliant solution concepts such as the Nash equilibrium, the core, the Shapley value, etc.
These solution concepts and their extensions are finding widespread use in solving several fundamental problems in
knowledge discovery and data mining. The problems include clustering, classification, discovering influential nodes,
social network analysis, etc. The first part of the talk will present the conceptual underpinnings underlying the use
of game theoretic techniques in such problem solving. The second part of the talk will delve into two problems where
we have recently obtained some interesting results: (a) discovering influential nodes in social networks using the
Shapley value and (b) identifying topologies of strategically formed social networks using a game theoretic approach.
Biography:
Y. Narahari is currently Professor and Chair at the Department of Computer Science and Automation, Indian Institute
of Science, Bangalore. The focus of his current research is to apply Game Theory and Mechanism Design to problems in
Internet and Network Economics, Electronic Commerce, and Social Networks. He is the lead author of a research monograph
entitled "Game Theoretic Problems in Network Economics and Mechanism Design Solutions" published recently by Springer, London.
He is a Fellow of IEEE, a J.C. Bose National Fellow, and a Fellow of all leading science and engineering acdemies in India.
The global companies with whom he has collaborated in the recent past include GM R & D, Intel, Infosys Technologies, and
Xerox Corporation. He is currently a Senior Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering.
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Title: Discovery of Patterns in Global Earth Science Data using Data Mining
Abstract:
The climate and earth sciences have recently undergone a rapid transformation from a data-poor to a data-rich
environment. In particular, climate and ecosystem related observations from remote sensors on satellites,
as well as outputs of climate or earth system models from large-scale computational platforms, provide
terabytes of temporal, spatial and spatio-temporal data. These massive and information-rich datasets offer
huge potential for understanding and predicting the behavior of the Earth's ecosystem and for advancing the
science of climate change.
However, mining patterns from Earth Science data is a difficult task due to the spatio-temporal nature of the data.
This talk will discuss various challenges involved in analyzing the data, and present some of our work on the
design of algorithms for finding spatio-temporal patterns from such data and their applications in discovering
interesting relationships among ecological variables from various parts of the Earth. A special focus will be on
techniques for land cover change detection (and their use in assessing the impact on carbon cycle) and finding
teleconnections between ocean and land variables.
Biography:
Vipin Kumar is currently William Norris Professor and Head of Computer Science and Engineering at the
University of Minnesota. His research interests include High Performance computing and data mining. He has
authored over 250 research articles, and co-edited or coauthored 10 books including the widely used text
book "Introduction to Parallel Computing", and "Introduction to Data Mining" both published by Addison-Wesley.
Kumar has served as chair/co-chair for over a dozen conferences/workshops in the area of data mining and
parallel computing.
In 2001, Kumar co-founded SIAM International Conference on Data Mining and served as its steering committee
chair until 2007. Kumar is a founding co-editor-in-chief of Journal of Statistical Analysis and Data Mining,
editor-in-chief of IEEE Intelligent Informatics Bulletin, and series editor of Data Mining and Knowledge
Discovery Book Series published by CRC Press/Chapman Hall. Kumar is a Fellow of the AAAS, ACM and IEEE.
He received the 2009 Distinguished Alumnus Award from the Computer Science Department, University of
Maryland College Park, and 2005 IEEE Computer Society's Technical Achievement Award for contributions to
the design and analysis of parallel algorithms, graph-partitioning, and data mining.
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