Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative (MURI) Project,
funded by the Office of Naval Research (ONR)

5.31.2010: All Hands Meeting June 3, 2011

Information regarding the recent meeting is now posted here. The full schedule is available and PDFs of each presentation will be posted soon.

11.15.2010: All Hands Meeting November 12th, 2010

Information regarding the recent meeting is now posted here. The full schedule is available along with the PDFs of each presentation and poster.

11.1.2010 Major New Publication on Treatment of Missing Data in Networks

This new paper lays out a coherent framework for treatment of missing data in statistical models of social network data and is a major step forward in allowing practitioners to handle missing data in a principled manner: Mark S. Handcock and Krista J. Gile "Modeling Networks from Sampled Data" (2010) Annals of Applied Statistics, 4, Number 1, 5-25. Corresponding software (R code) for handling missing data has also been released in the "ergm" package.

9.26.2010 Löffler and Nöllenberg win Graph Drawing Challenge

A team formed by two postdoctoral researchers, Maarten Löffler and Martin Nöllenberg, was the winner of the Graph Drawing Challenge at the 18th International Graph Drawing Symposium in Konstanz, Germany, September 21-24, 2010. Teams competing in the challenge were given a limited time to draw six different graphs, and received points based on the quality of their drawings compared to the best drawing for each graph. The contest winners receive a 250 euro prize. Graph drawing is a research area involving the automated visual display of symbolic information relating pairs of elements in social networks, biological networks, and networks representing software systems; Löffler and Nöllenberg have been working with project PI' David Eppstein and Michael T. Goodrich on research in graph drawing and social network analysis.

9.10.2010: Strash and Goodrich accepted to ISAAC

Darren Strash and PI Mike Goodrich's work, “Priority Range Trees”, was accepted to the 21st International Symposium on Algorithms and Computation (ISAAC 2010), Jeju, Korea, December 2011. This paper provides a data structure for geometric queries on prioritized data. They apply concepts from human perception in order to prioritize data points, achieving a data structure with query times approaching the information theoretic lower bounds with low storage cost.

9.06.2010: Eppstein gives plenary talk at Canadian Conference on Computation Geometry

Project PI Eppstein presented an invited plenary talk at the 22nd Canadian Conference on Computational Geometry, Winnipeg, Canada, August 2010, entitled “Regular labelings and geometric structures”. An important component of the talk concerns schematization of geographic data by representing geographic regions as rectangles while preserving their adjacencies and orientations.

9.05.2010: Eppstein, Goodrich, Strash and Trott accepted to COCOA 2010

Eppstein, Goodrich, Strash, and Trott's work, “Extended h-index parameterized data structures for computing dynamic subgraph statistics”, was accepted to the 4th Int. Conf. on Combinatorial Optimization and Applications (COCOA 2010), Hawaii, December 2010. This paper investigates fast data structures for implementing ERGM models of social networks, generalizing and extending Eppstein's work with Spiro from WADS 2009.

9.03.2010: löffler presented at European Symposium on Algorithms

löffler presents paper “Median Trajectories” with Kevin Buchin, Maike Buchin, Marc van Kreveld, Rodrigo Silveira, Carola Wenk and Lionov Wiratma at the European Symposium on Algorithms. This paper is about defining and computing a good representative trajectory for a large collection of similar trajectories in the plane, for example as produced by giving GPS devices to a flock of sheep, or a group of hikers.

9.01.2010: PI Eppstein, Löffler and Strash accepted to ISAAC

The work of Project PI Eppstein and team members Löffler and Strash entitled “Listing all maximal cliques in sparse graphs in near-optimal time”, was accepted to the 21st International Symposium on Algorithms and Computation (ISAAC 2010), Jeju, Korea, December 2011. This paper presents a significant theoretical speedup for the problem of finding cliques in sparse graphs, as are likely to arise in social networking contexts. Clique-finding is important both as a way of finding significant clusters of actors in social networks and as a potential feature to use in ERGM models of social networks.

8.25.2010: Almquist Presents at the QMSS Seminar at University College Dublin

Zack Almquist presented “Contending Parties: A Logistic Choice Analysis of Inter and Intra-group Blog Citation Dynamics in the 2004 US Presidential Election” (co-authored with lab PI Carter Butts) at the QMSS Seminar on “Power: Decision Making and Social Networks” at the University College Dublin, Ireland.

8.19.2010: Project Alum Acton Moves to UMass

Congratulations to team member and Sociology Ph.D. student Ryan Acton on completing his doctoral degree, and transitioning to his new position as Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Dr. Acton will join a select group of interdisciplinary researchers as part of a new UMass initiative on computational social science, continuing his work on social networks, online behavior, and research methodology.

8.18.2010: Butts Honored with Leo Goodman Award

We are pleased to announce that PI Carter Butts has been named the 2010 recipient of the prestigious Leo A. Goodman award of the American Sociological Association's Section on Methodology. The Goodman award is the highest honor granted to young methodological researchers within the discipline, recognizing cumulative contributions to sociological methodology by a scholar who is no more than 15 years past the completion of his or her Ph.D.

8.16.2010: Asuncion and Goodrich to present at WEPS

Asuncion and project PI Goodrich with present work entitled “Turning Privacy Leaks into Floods: Surreptitious Discovery of Social Network Friendships and Other Sensitive Binary Attribute Vectors” at the Workshop on Privacy in the Electronic Society, ACM. Their research shows that social network adjacency matrices can be surreptitiously discovered using nonadaptive group testing attacks.

8.14.2010: Project Members Present Research at ASA

Project PI Carter Butts and team members Chris Marcum, Zack Almquist, Emma Spiro, Lorien Jasny, and Sean Fitzhugh will present their ongoing research at the 105th annual meeting of the American Sociological Association.

8.05.2010: PI Smyth presented at MLG 2010

Padhraic Smyth presented an invited talk at the Eighth Workshop on Mining and with Graphs (MLG 2010) on modeling relational data over time with statistical latent variable models.

8.01.2010: Asuncion awarded UC Irvine Graduate Dean's Dissertation Fellowship

Asuncion will be a 2010-2011 Fellow. This award allows students to forgo their non-research related employment obligations to concentrate on completing their dissertation. Details are outlined below.

7.30.2010: PI's Eppstein and Goodrich and Löffler accepted to International Symposium on Graph Drawing

Eppstien and Goodrich, with collaborators Duncan, Kobourov, and Nöllenburg were accepted to the 18th Int. Symp. Graph Drawing, Konstanz, Germany, September 2010. Their work is entitled “Lombardi drawings of graphs.” Mark Lombardi was a fine artist known for his drawings of social networks; we abstracted two key properties of drawings from his art (the use of circular arcs for edges and the even spacing of edges around each vertex) and investigated several classes of networks that can be shown to have drawings satisfying these properties. Team member Löffler will also attend the upcoming symposium to present “Optimal 3D Angular Resolution for Low-Degree Graphs”with Eppstein, Mumford and Nöllenburg, and "Drawing Graphs in the Plane with a Prescribed Outer Face and Polynomial Area" with Chambers, Eppstein and Goodrich.

7.28.10: DuBois and Smyth's work presented at AMC SIGKDD

Chris DuBois presented a paper co-authored with project PI Smyth on modeling relational events using latent variable models at the ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining in Washington DC. The conference is the main annual research conference in the data mining area and has a 16% acceptance rate.

7.25.2010: Project PI's Eppstein and Goodrich to present at ACM GIS 2010

Eppstein and Goodrich along with collaborator Tamassia's work “Privacy-preserving data-oblivious geometric algorithms for geographic data”, was accepted to the 18th ACM SIGSPATIAL Int. Conf. Advances in Geographic Information Systems (ACM GIS 2010), San Jose, California, November 2010. This paper concerns techniques for computing with social network data that is annotated with encrypted geographic locations of network participants, in a way that preserves the privacy of the encrypted data.

7.22.2010: Handcock and Almquist Present at useR!2010 Conference

STATNET developer and project PI Mark Handcock was an invited speaker at useR!2010 t NIST in Gaithersburg, MD. Project member Zack Almquist also presented “US Demographic and Census Data in R.”

7.11.2010: Asuncion's work presented at AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence

Team member Asuncion's collaborative work with Porteous and Welling, entitled, “Bayesian Matrix Factorization with Side Information and Dirichlet Process Mixtures,” was presented at AAAI in Altanta, Georgia.

7.10.2010: Marcum Presents at Hazards Conference

Team member Christopher Marcum presented findings from the Improvisation in Emergency Response Project at the Annual Hazards Workshop in Bloomfield, Colorado. The datasets used in this research are packaged as R data objects, complete with documentation, for future public distribution.

7.01.2010: Smyth named Fellow of the AAAI

PI Padhraic Smyth was named a Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) in July 2010 for significant contributions to the theory and practice of statistical machine learning. The AAAI Fellows program recognizes individuals who have made significant, sustained contributions to the field of artificial intelligence. Smyth is one of eight researchers worldwide to be named a AAAI Fellow this year.

6.29.2010: Team Well Represented at Sunbelt XXX

PI Butts, along student student members Almquist, DuBois, Fitzhugh, Jasny, and Spiro, present at the Sunbelt XXX Networks Conference in Riva del Garda, Italy. Research presented showcases collaborations between sociologist, statisticians, and computer scientists.

6.21.2010: Asuncion presents at International Conference on Machine Learning

Arthur Asuncion present collaborative work with Liu, Ihler, and project PI Smyth at 27th International Conference on Machine Learning, in Haifa, Israel. Their work in entitled “Particle Filtered MCMC-MLE with Connections to Contrastive Divergence.” Asuncion also presented his work"Approximate Mean Field for Dirichlet-Based Models" at the Topic Models Workshop.

6.18.2010: DuBois and Almquist attend PIMS Summer School on Social Networks

Chris DuBois and Zack Almquist attend summer school on social networks in Whistler, CA funded by the Pacific Institute for the Mathematical Sciences (PIMS). The group focuses on Bayesian methods for network analysis. The students attended a mix of theoretical and practical courses taught by ten world experts in the field, including project PI Carter Butts. Both students received support to attend the school.

6.01.2010: Asuncion is Yahoo! Key Scientific Challenges Winner

In addition to receiving $5,000 in unrestricted seed funding, Asuncion will head at Yahoo! headquarters in Sunnyvale, California in September for the exclusive Key Scientific Challenges Graduate Student Summit where he will spend two days with Yahoo! Labs scientists presenting and discussing his work.

5.17.2010: Workshop by Butts and Students at Duke

Project PI Butts, with assistance from lab members Zack Almquist, Sean Fitzhugh, and Emma Spiro, taught workshop on Network Analysis with statnet at Duke University's 2010 Political Networks Conference

5.9.2010: Upcoming Talk by Butts at Stanford

PI Butts will be speaking to the Stanford University MAPSS Colloqium this Thursday, May 13, on the use of relational event models to study social interaction. This talk will feature work from the NCASD Lab on statistical models for inferring behavior patterns from relational dynamics, and will highlight our recent findings regarding communication during the WTC disaster.

4.30.2010: Upcoming Workshop by Butts at RAND

Project PI Butts will be the featured presenter at this year's Applied Statistics Workshop of the Southern California chapter of the American Statistical Association. The workshop will be held at RAND's Santa Monica, CA office on 4/30/2010, and will provide a practical introduction to the statistical analysis of social network data, as well as pointers on the use of the statnet suite of network analysis tools. Registration is required.

Participating Universities