Abstract

The collection and analysis of data about individuals has changed dramatically over the past 50 years. Early data collection focused on the collection of small amounts of demographic data (such as a person's age and occupation), moving to more detailed and dynamic transaction data (such as credit card and telephone records), up to the modern age of individuallevel "micro-data" encompassing emails, microblogs, online social media, geolocation data, and more. In this context, I will describe recent research (in my group and elsewhere) on individual-level micro-event time-series, namely, data consisting of timestamped events that capture detailed pictures of our daily interactions with the world around us. The talk will discuss general themes in analyzing such data as well as specific ongoing research projects such as spatial modeling of geolocated event data and analysis of temporal patterns in individual email histories.

Short-CV

Padhraic Smyth is a Professor at the University of California, Irvine, in the Department of Computer Science with a joint appointment in Statistics, and is also Director of the newly founded Data Science Initiative at UC Irvine. His research interests include machine learning, data mining, pattern recognition, and applied statistics. He is an ACM Fellow (since 2013), a AAAI Fellow (since 2010), and a recipient of the ACM SIGKDD Innovation award in 2009. Padhraic has served in editorial and advisory positions for journals such as the Journal of Machine Learning Research, the Journal of the American Statistical Association, and the IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering. He is co-author of the text Modeling the Internet and the Web: Probabilistic Methods and Algorithms and Principles of Data Mining, and he served as program chair of the ACM SIGKDD 2011 conference and the UAI 2013 conference. In addition to his academic research he is also active in industry consulting, working with companies such as eBay, Samsung, Yahoo!, Microsoft, Oracle, Nokia, and AT&T, as well as serving as scientific advisor to local startups in Orange County. He also served as an academic advisor to Netflix for the Netflix prize competition from 2006 to 2009. Padhraic received a first class honors degree in Electronic Engineering from the National University of Ireland in Galway in 1984, and the MSEE and PhD degrees (in 1985 and 1988) in Electrical Engineering from the California Institute of Technology.

Host: Dr. Ralf Krestel