Time: 2.00 pm, Thursday, 6 December 2007
Location: Sydney Uni, Lecture Theatre, Room 123, SIT Building
Speaker: Prof. Jaideep Srivastava
University of Minnesota, USA
Title: Data Mining for Social Network Analysis
ABSTRACT:
A social network is defined as a social structure of individuals, who are related (directly or indirectly to each other) based on a common relation of interest, e.g. friendship, trust, etc. Social network analysis is the study of social networks to understand their structure and behavior. Social network analysis has gained prominence due to its use in different applications - from product marketing (e.g. viral marketing) to search engines and organizational dynamics (e.g. management). Recently there has been a rapid increase in interest regarding social network analysis in the data mining community. The basic motivation is the demand to exploit knowledge from copious amounts of data collected, pertaining to social behavior of users in online environments. A prime example of this are the research efforts dedicated towards the Enron email dataset. Data mining based techniques are proving to be useful for analysis of social network data, especially for large datasets that cannot be handled by traditional methods.
This talk will provide an up-to-date introduction to the increasingly important field of data mining in social network analysis, and a brief overview of research directions in this field. We first provide an introduction to social network analysis and then briefly survey the research in this field. Next, an overview of emerging research in data mining for social network analysis is presented. Finally, we will present our own work in two areas: (i) data mining for socio-cognitive analysis of email networks, and (ii) data mining on logs from massively multi-player online (MMO) games to understand social and group dynamics amongst players.
SPEAKERS BIOGRAPHY:
Jaideep Srivastava is a professor at the University of Minnesota, where he has established and led a research laboratory which conducts research in the information and knowledge aspects of computing. He has supervised 24 Ph.D. dissertations and 50 M.S. theses, and authored or co-authored over 200 papers in refereed journals and conferences. Dr Srivastava have served on the editorial boards of various journals, including IEEE TPDS, IEEE TKDE, and the VLDB journal. He has also served as Program and Conference Chair for a number of prominent conferences, especially in the area of data mining, and is on the Steering Committee for the PAKDD series of conferences. He has delivered a number of keynote addresses, plenary talks, and invited tutorials at major conferences.
Dr Srivastava has a very active interaction with the industry, in both consulting and executive roles. Specifically, during a 2-year sabbatical during 1999-2001, he lead a corporate data mining team at Amazon.com (www.amazon.com) and built a data analytics department at Yodlee (www.yodlee.com) from the ground up. More recently, he spent two years as the Chief Technology Officer for Persistent Systems, where he built an RandD division and oversaw the redesign of the training and technical vitalization program for 2,200+ engineers. He has provided technology and technology strategy advice to a number of large corporations including Cargill, United Technologies, IBM, Honeywell, 3M, and Eaton. He has served in an advisory capacity to a number of small companies, including Lancet Software and Infobionics.
Dr Srivastava has also played an active advisory role in the government sector. Specifically, he has served as the US federal government's expert witness in a nationally significant tax case. He is presently serving as Senior Technology Advisor to the State of Minnesota, and is on the Technology Advisory Council to the Chief Minister of Maharashtra, India. He is a Fellow of the IEEE, and has been an IEEE Distinguished Visitor.
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Time: Wednesday 29 August 2007, 4-5 pm
Location: Sydney Uni, School of IT Building, room 123
Speaker: Kerry Taylor
CSIRO ICT Centre, Canberra
Title: Water Information Management: Opportunities for Research
ABSTRACT:
On 25th January this year the Prime Minister released a $10 bn plan for improved management of Australia's scarce water resources. Underpinning that plan was proposed legislation, the "Water Bill" that passed through the Australian Parliament on 17th August 2007. A key element of that plan, and the legislation, is a new role for the Bureau of Meteorology to to "hold and manage all of Australia's water data". However, water data is a fluid concept, and the task challenges our capability for information systems design in many ways. I will discuss the the major challenges I can see for the Bureau and its partners in meeting the expectations for water information management, and identify opportunities for research in computer science and information systems that could help.
Note: I do not represent the Bureau of Meteorology. This seminar represents
my own opinions only!
SPEAKER'S BIOGRAPHY:
Dr Kerry Taylor is a research group leader in the CSIRO ICT Centre, and a founding member of the ARC Network for Enterprise Information Infrastructure. She was educated in Computer Science at UNSW and ANU, and has broad interests in AI, databases, service oriented architectures, and environmental information systems. Currently, most of her work is about using semantic representations, especially ontologies, to support data integration and evolvable information systems.
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Time: 4-5pm Wednesday 16 May 2007
Location: Sydney Uni, School of IT Building, room 123
Speaker: A/Prof Boualem Benatallah
School of Computer Science and Engineering
University of New South Wales
Title: Towards an Engineering Discipline for Service Oriented Architectures
ABSTRACT:
The emerging next-generation Web technologies, centered on the concept of Web services, promise to enable interactions and efficiencies that have not been experienced before. The foundation of this technology lies in the modularization and virtualization of system functions as services that: (i) can be described, advertised and discovered using (XML-based) standard languages, and (ii) interact through standard Internet protocols. This talk outlines some of the significant achievements and opportunities in the field of service oriented computing. We will then examines service interactions challenges. While much progress has been made toward providing basic interoperability at the messaging layer, there is still a lot to be done. We highlight service life cycle aspects including business protocol discovery, adaptation, and evolution. We discuss the importance of conceptual modeling, design intelligence, models alignment and analysis to facilitate large-scale interoperation among Web services.
SPEAKER'S BIOGRAPHY:
Dr. Boualem Benatallah received his PhD degree in computer science from Grenoble University (IMAG, France). He is associate Professor and research coordinator at the School of Computer Science and Engineering, UNSW. His research interests lie in the areas of Web service protocols analysis and management, enterprise services integration, large scale and autonomous data sharing, process modeling and service oriented architectures for pervasive computing. He has several ARC (Australian Research Council) funded projects in these areas. He was a visiting scholar at Purdue University (USA), Visiting Professor at INRIA-LORIA (France), Visiting Professor at Blaise Pascal University (Clermont-Ferrand, France), Visting Professor at Claude Bernard University (Lyon, France). He has been a Program Committee member of several international conferences including VLDB, ICDE, EDBT, WWW, ER, ICSOC, and ICWS. He was the PC chair of several Int. workshops on Web services. He was PC co-chair of BPM'05 and ICSOC'05. He is PC co-chair of WISE'07. He is member of the steering committee on the int. conference on business process management and member of the editorial boards of a number of international journals. He was guest editor of several journal special issues on Web services. He was keynote and tutorial speaker on Web Services at several workshops and conferences. He is co-author of Interconnecting Heterogeneous Information Systems (Kluwer,1998). He is also co-author of E-Commerce Enabling Technologies, Pearson Education, 2002. He has published widely in international journals and con-ferences including IEEE TKDE, IEEE TSE, IEEE Internet Computing, IEEE Net-work, IEEE Intelligent Systems, IEEE computer, CACM, VLDB, PADD journals and IEEE ICDE, IEEE ICDS, WWW, ICSE, ER conferences.
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Time: 4-5pm Wednesday 09 May 2007
Location: Sydney Uni, School of IT Building, room 123
Speaker: Dr Jian Yang
Department of Computing
Macquarie University
Title: Service Oriented Computing and Business Process Management
ABSTRACT:
The SOC paradigm redefines the concept of an application as a distributed set of implementation-independent services executing as an orchestrated sequence of messaging and event processing. BPM on the other hand concerns the issues in managing the processes seperately from
the applications that are supported by the processes. The confluence of SOA and BPM is resulting in a new process-centric paradigm that holds great promise for enterprise and B2B computing. This talk will discuss the issues in the area of SOC and BPM, particularly in: business collaboration modelling, business transaction management in the context of SOC, security in business collaboration, and differentiated service design. Several projects that are currently carried out in the group will be introduced.
SPEAKER'S BIOGRAPHY:
Dr. Jian Yang is an associate professor at Department of Computing, Macquarie University. Before she joined Macquarie University, she worked as an associate professor at Tilburg University, Netherlands, a senior research scientist at the Division of Mathematical and Information Science, CSIRO, Australia, and as a lecturer at Dept of Computer Science, The Australian Defence Force Academy, University of New South Wales. Dr. Yang involved in organizing the first Service Oriented Computing workshop and conference, and has organized several special issues on SOC with various journals.
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4-5 pm Wednesday 28 March 2007
Sydney Uni, School of IT Building, Room 123
Speaker: A/Prof Xuemin Lin
Database Research Group
School of Computer Science and Engineering
The University of New South Wales
Title: Continuously Maintaining Order Statistics over Data Streams
ABSTRACT:
Order statistics over data streams have many real applications, including data mining, financial data analysis, high speed network management, sensor data analysis, etc. In this talk, I will introduce space- and time-efficient one-scan techniques of continuously maintaining order statistics for supporting approximate rank (quantile) queries. These include deterministic and randomized approximate techniques. I will also address open issues in the area.
BIOGRAPHY:
Xuemin Lin is an Associate Professor in the School of Computer Science and Engineering, the University of New South Wales. He has been leading the database research group since 2001. Before joining UNSW, Xuemin held various academic positions at University of Queensland and University of Western Australia. He also taught at the Chinese University of Hong Kong in 2000. Dr. Lin got his PhD in Computer Science from the University of Queensland in 1992 and his BSc in Applied Math from Fudan University in 1984. During 1984-1988, he studied for PhD in Applied Math at Fudan University. His current research interests lie in data streams, approximate query processing, data streams, spatial data analysis, DB & IR, graph databases, and graph visualization. He has published over 100 research papers in theory and DB societies including TODS, TKDE, Algorithmic, Theoretical Computer Science, Computational Geometry Journal, VLDB, ICDE, EDBT, etc. Xuemin serves as PC (or PC-co chairs) in a number of conferences in database systems and algorithms.
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4-5pm Wednesday 07 February 2007
Sydney Uni, School of IT Building, Room 123
Speaker: Prof Shirley Gregor, ANU
Title: Identifying the Key Strategies in the Realization of Value from Information Technology
ABSTRACT:
The generation of business value from the use of information and communication technologies (ICT) is an issue of perennial interest and econometric research indicates that some firms consistently achieve higher returns from the use of IT than others. It is not clear, however, why some firms are able to gain more advantage from the use of ICT than others. This talk addresses two questions: (1) Are there key factors, strategies or mechanisms that are consistently linked to the realization of business value from ICT across organizations? (2) If so, what is the nature of these factors, strategies and mechanisms? The talk relies on an underlying theoretical model that links ICT value realization to influences in the macro environment, the competitive environment and the focal firm through processes of mutual causality. Our research methodology employed the statistical technique of regression tree analyses to discover patterns (/data mining/) in data from a survey of 1050 organizations. These analyses extracted from a large data set the explanatory factors that were most influential in explaining the outcome variable of value realization. An in-depth study of qualitative interview data and further literature exploration following the data mining aimed at more clearly defining the nature of the key factors affecting value realization that were identified in the quantitative analysis phase. The four prime explanatory constructs identified for ICT value realization across all organizations and all industries were as follows: (i) ICT investment strategies (Prospector, Analyser and Defender); (ii) Strategic management practices; (iii) Transformational management practices; and (iv)Use of electronic banking and bill-paying (an indication of level of e-commerce engagement). A construct identified as underlying these factors was labelled "ICT aware management", an indication of the degree to which management understood and gave direction to ICT initiatives. The study adds further evidence to the debate about the relative importance of management and organizational factors in driving ICT productivity gains. Practically, it shows that ICT related benefits originate from factors largely within an organization's control.
BIOGRAPHY:
Shirley Gregor is Professor of Information Systems at the Australian National University, Canberra, where she heads the National Centre for Information Systems Research and is Head of the School of Accounting and Business Information Systems. Professor Gregor~Rs current research interests include the adoption and strategic use of information and communications technologies, intelligent systems and human-computer interface issues, and the theoretical foundations of information systems. Dr Gregor has led several large projects in the e-commerce area funded by the Meat Research Corporation, the Department of Communications, Information Technology and the Arts, and the Australian Research Council. Professor Gregor obtained her Ph.D. in Information Systems from the University of Queensland. Dr Gregor's publications include 4 edited books, 15 book chapters and over 80 papers in conferences and journals such as Management Information Systems Quarterly, International Journal of Electronic Commerce, International Journal of Human Computer Studies, International Journal of Electronic Commerce, European Journal of Information Systems and Information Technology & People.
