GraphScope: parameter-free mining of large time-evolving graphs
How can we find communities in dynamic networks of socialinteractions, such as who calls whom, who emails whom, or who sells to whom? How can we spot discontinuity time-points in such streams of graphs, in an on-line, any-time fashion? We propose GraphScope, that addresses both problems, using information theoretic principles. Contrary to the majority of earlier methods, it needs no user-defined parameters. Moreover, it is designed to operate on large graphs, in a streaming fashion. We demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of our GraphScope on real datasets from several diverse domains. In all cases it produces meaningful time-evolving patterns that agree with human intuition.

title: Relevance search and anomaly detection in bipartite graphs
abstract: Many real applications can be modeled using bipartite graphs, such as users vs. files in a P2P system, traders vs. stocks in a financial trading system, conferences vs. authors in a scientific publication network, and so on. We introduce two operations on bipartite graphs: 1) identifying similar nodes (relevance search), and 2) finding nodes connecting irrelevant nodes (anomaly detection). And we propose algorithms to compute the relevance score for each node using random walk with restarts and graph partitioning; we also propose algorithms to identify anomalies, using relevance scores. We evaluate the quality of relevance search based on semantics of the datasets, and we also measure the performance of the anomaly detection algorithm with manually injected anomalies. Both effectiveness and efficiency of the methods are confirmed by experiments on several real datasets.

title: Hiding in the Crowd: Privacy Preservation on Evolving Streams through Correlation Tracking
abstract: We address the problem of preserving privacy in streams, which has received surprisingly limited attention. For static data, a well-studied and widely used approach is based on random perturbation of the data values. However, streams pose additional challenges. First, analysis of the data has to be performed incrementally, using limited processing time and buffer space, making batch approaches unsuitable. Second, the characteristics of streams evolve over time. Consequently, approaches based on global analysis of the data are not adequate. We show that it is possible to efficiently and effectively track the correlation and autocorrelation structure of multivariate streams and leverage it to add noise which maximally preserves privacy, in the sense that it is very hard to remove. Our techniques achieve much better results than previous static, global approaches, while requiring limited processing time and memory. We provide both a mathematical analysis and experimental evaluation on real data to validate the correctness, efficiency, and effectiveness of our algorithms.

title: Selectivity estimation for predictive spatio-temporal queries
abstract: We propose a cost model for selectivity estimation of predictive spatio-temporal window queries. Initially, we focus on uniform data proposing formulae that capture both points and rectangles, and any type of object/query mobility combination (i.e., dynamic objects, dynamic queries or both). Then, we apply the model to nonuniform datasets by introducing spatio-temporal histograms, which in addition to the spatial, also consider the velocity distributions during partitioning. The advantages of our techniques are (i) high accuracy (1-2 orders of magnitude lower error than previous techniques), (ii) ability to handle all query types, and (iii) efficient handling of updates.

title: Beyond streams and graphs: dynamic tensor analysis
abstract: How do we find patterns in author-keyword associations, evolving over time? Or in Data Cubes, with product-branch-customer sales information? Matrix decompositions, like principal component analysis (PCA) and variants, are invaluable tools for mining, dimensionality reduction, feature selection, rule identification in numerous settings like streaming data, text, graphs, social networks and many more. However, they have only two orders, like author and keyword, in the above example.We propose to envision such higher order data as tensors,and tap the vast literature on the topic. However, these methods do not necessarily scale up, let alone operate on semi-infinite streams. Thus, we introduce the dynamic tensor analysis (DTA) method, and its variants. DTA provides a compact summary for high-order and high-dimensional data, and it also reveals the hidden correlations. Algorithmically, we designed DTA very carefully so that it is (a) scalable, (b) space efficient (it does not need to store the past) and (c) fully automatic with no need for user defined parameters. Moreover, we propose STA, a streaming tensor analysis method, which provides a fast, streaming approximation to DTA.We implemented all our methods, and applied them in two real settings, namely, anomaly detection and multi-way latent semantic indexing. We used two real, large datasets, one on network flow data (100GB over 1 month) and one from DBLP (200MB over 25 years). Our experiments show that our methods are fast, accurate and that they find interesting patterns and outliers on the real datasets.

title: InteMon: intelligent system monitoring on large clusters
abstract: InteMon is a prototype monitoring and mining system for large clusters. Currently, it monitors over 100 hosts of a prototype data center at CMU. It uses the SNMP protocol and it stores the monitoring data in an mySQL database. Then, it allows for visualization of the time-series data using a JSP web-based frontend interface for users.What sets it apart from other cluster monitoring systems is its ability to automatically analyze the monitoring data in real time and alert the users for potential anomalies. It uses state of the art stream mining methods, it has a sophisticated definition of anomalies (broken correlations among input streams), and it can also pinpoint the reason of the anomaly. InteMon has a user-friendly GUI, it allows the users to perform interactive mining tasks, and it is fully operational.

title: CWS: a comparative web search system
abstract: In this paper, we define and study a novel search problem: Comparative Web Search (CWS). The task of CWS is to seek relevant and comparative information from the Web to help users conduct comparisons among a set of topics. A system called CWS is developed to effectively facilitate Web users' comparison needs. Given a set of queries, which represent the topics that a user wants to compare, the system is characterized by: (1) automatic retrieval and ranking of Web pages by incorporating both their relevance to the queries and the comparative contents they contain; (2) automatic clustering of the comparative contents into semantically meaningful themes; (3) extraction of representative keyphrases to summarize the commonness and differences of the comparative contents in each theme. We developed a novel interface which supports two types of view modes: a pair-view which displays the result in the page level, and a cluster-view which organizes the comparative pages into the themes and displays the extracted phrases to facilitate users' comparison. Experiment results show the CWS system is effective and efficient.

title: Specifying and reasoning about generic architecture in TCOZ
abstract: Formal modeling techniques can be used to define and verify software architectures precisely. The paper applies the integrated formal specification technique, Timed Communicating Object Z (TCOZ), to generic software architecture modeling and verification.

title: An architecture for developing aspect-oriented Web services
abstract: Current Web services approaches have many limitations, especially with description, discovery and integration mechanisms. In this paper we present a novel software architecture called aspect-oriented Web services (AOWS) which addresses these problems. AOWS uses descriptions of cross-cutting concerns between Web services to give more complete descriptions of services, supporting richer dynamic discovery and seamless integration. We describe our architecture, a formal specification of it and an implementation using .NET Web services technology.

title: Drag-and-drop pasting
abstract: In this paper, we present a user-friendly system for seamless image composition, which we call drag-and-drop pasting. We observe that for Poisson image editing [Perez et al. 2003] to work well, the user must carefully draw a boundary on the source image to indicate the region of interest, such that salient structures in source and target images do not conflict with each other along the boundary. To make Poisson image editing more practical and easy to use, we propose a new objective function to compute an optimized boundary condition. A shortest closed-path algorithm is designed to search for the location of the boundary. Moreover, to faithfully preserve the object's fractional boundary, we construct a blended guidance field to incorporate the object's alpha matte. To use our system, the user needs only to simply outline a region of interest in the source image, and then drag and drop it onto the target image. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our "drag-and-drop pasting" system.

title: Thread detection in dynamic text message streams
abstract: Text message stream is a newly emerging type of Web data which is produced in enormous quantities with the popularity of Instant Messaging and Internet Relay Chat. It is beneficial for detecting the threads contained in the text stream for various applications, including information retrieval, expert recognition and even crime prevention. Despite its importance, not much research has been conducted so far on this problem due to the characteristics of the data in which the messages are usually very short and incomplete. In this paper, we present a stringent definition of the thread detection task and our preliminary solution to it. We propose three variations of a single-pass clustering algorithm for exploiting the temporal information in the streams. An algorithm based on linguistic features is also put forward to exploit the discourse structure information. We conducted several experiments to compare our approaches with some existing algorithms on a real dataset. The results show that all three variations of the single-pass algorithm outperform the basic single-pass algorithm. Our proposed algorithm based on linguistic features improves the performance relatively by 69.5% and 9.7% when compared with the basic single-pass algorithm and the best variation algorithm in terms of F1 respectively.