I work in Data Mining and Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), and I combine the best from both worlds to create tools that help people make sense of graphs with billions of nodes and edges. I present my work in three interrelated topics:
(1) Attention Routing: I introduce this idea, based on anomaly detection and machine inference, that automatically draws people's attention to interesting parts of the graph. I describe two examples: 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: I describe 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) Scaling Up: I show how we may enable interactive analytics of large graphs with a hybrid architecture that harnesses parallel computation for expensive tasks, and local computation for fast machine inference, visualization, and interaction.
Bio: Duen Horng "Polo" Chau is a Ph.D. candidate in the Machine Learning Department at Carnegie Mellon University. He received a Masters in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) from Carnegie Mellon.
Polo is working to bridge the fields of Data Mining and HCI. He develops tools that combine the best of both worlds to help people make sense of large graphs with billions of nodes and edges. His research interests span data mining, machine learning, information visualization and HCI.
Polo solves large-scale problems that bring great impact to society. His NetProbe auction fraud detection system made headlines on The Wall Street Journal, CNN, TV and radio. His Polonium malware detection technology (with Symantec, patent-pending) protects 120 million people worldwide.
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.