Social Network Analysis by Compression: Not Only Space Saving, but also Insight Gaining

Seminar Slides: Download (PDF)

When: Thursday, December 12, 2013
Where: PGH 563
Time: 11:00 AM

Speaker: Prof. Jian Pei, Simon Fraser University

Host: Dr. Carlos Ordonez

Do you know compressing a social network may provide significant insights into the structure of the network? In this talk, I will argue that compressing a large social network not only helps us to save storage space, but the compressibility of nodes and subgraphs indeed offers a meaningful measurement for social network analysis. Compressing social networks effectively and efficiently is very challenging. I will advocate a systematic framework of social network compression and analysis using multi-position linearization, and discuss the challenges from the theoretical point of view. Moreover, I will present our latest progress on lossless and lossy compression methods. On the compression side, our methods support efficient neighborhood query answering without decomposition. On the social network analysis side, as a showcase, our methods can help to improve community detection.

Bio:
Jian Pei is currently a professor at the School of Computing Science at Simon Fraser University, Canada. He received a Ph.D. degree in Computing Science from the same school in 2002, under Dr. Jiawei Han?s supervision.  His research interests can be summarized as developing effective and efficient data analysis techniques for novel data intensive applications. Particularly, he is currently interested in various techniques of data mining, information retrieval, data warehousing, online analytical processing, and database systems, as well as their applications in social networks, network security informatics, healthcare informatics, business intelligence, and web search. His research outcome has been adopted by industry production systems.  He has published prolifically in premier academic venues.  His publications have been cited more than 20,000 times.  His research has been supported in part by many government agencies, such as Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) and the National Science Foundation (NSF) of the United States, and many industry partners, such as Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard Company (HP), IBM Corporation, SAP Business Objects, Pacific Blue Cross, Fortinet, and the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce (CIBC).  Currently, his priority in research is on developing industry relations and collaboration, and transferring his technologies to industry applications. He is also actively serving the professional communities.  He is current the editor-in-chief of IEEE Transactions of Knowledge and Data Engineering, and an associate editor or editorial board member of several premier journals in his areas.  He has played key roles in many top academic conferences.  He is a director of ACM SIGKDD and an ACM Distinguished Speaker.  He received several prestigious awards.