6/10/18: Detecting Suspicious Members in An Online Emotional Support Service accepted at SecureComm 2018. This paper introduces a highly accurate detection scheme to identify behaviors and users who cyberbully others on the online emotional support service 7 Cups. This work is in collaboration with Junjie Zhang and his students.

4/30/18: Matt successfully defends his thesis on the integration of statistical learning theory in density based clustering for intrinsic point of interest discovery from trajectory data. Matt will be entering the AFRL ORISE fellowship program after returning from NASA this summer. **Congratulations Matt!**

4/16/18: dbscan: Fast Density Based Clustering in R accepted for publication in the Journal of Statistical Software. This article documents the development of the dbscan open source R package for density based clustering. Matt Piekenbrock implemented state-of-the-art density based clustering methods in the package and was instrumental in making dbscan the fastest library for density based clustering available today. Congratulations Matt!

4/9/18: Jace successfully defends his thesis on a new statistical dynamic network model incorporating seasonal dynamics. He will be joining Purdue as a Ph.D. student in the Fall. **Congratulations Jace!**

3/28/18: Multiple WaCS students have secured research internships this summer: Ning heads to NEC Labs in Princeton to tackle visual reasoning problems by deep learning; Kyle will be at AFRL and the Wright Brothers Institute working on topological data analysis and applications to DoD problems; Matt leaves for NASA to explore unsupervised learning problems for explainable AI; Jace leaves for Tenet3 to develop new machine learning methods over networks for cybersecurity use cases; and Jameson leaves for AFRL to develop software for satellites. Congratulations everyone!

1/20/18: Lakshika successfully defends her thesis on studying gang member profiles on Twitter. She will be joining Gracenote as a research engineer in Okland, CA this summer.
**Congratulations Lakshika!**

1/16/18: Some (non-)Universal Features of Web Robot Traffic accepted at IEEE Conference on Information Sciences and Systems. This study identifies statistical properties of web robot traffic that are common and contrasting across multiple web servers around the world. Great job Mahdieh!

1/14/18: Contrasting Web Robot and Human Behaviors with Network Models accepted for publication in the Journal of Communications. The article contrasts web robot and human visititation behaviors through the lens of network analytics. Congratulations Kyle!

11/15/17: Relating Input Concepts to Convolutional Neural Network Decisions accepted at NIPS Workshop on Explainable Machine Learning. This work develops a novel algorithm to find distributed representations of input concepts in a convolutional neural network. It then studies how types of representations could affect the decisions the deep learning system makes. Well done Ning!

11/3/17: EmojiNet, our machine readable sense inventory for Emoji co-developed by Lakshika, has been selected for publication as a Kaggle dataset. Check it out here. If you play around with it let us know what you find! And, an article on EmojiNet has been picked up by Psychology Today. Neat!

10/10/17:Realistic Traffic Generation for Web Robots accepted at IEEE Intl. Conference on Machine Learning and Applications 2017. This work presents a generative process for producing synthetic sequences of web robot traffic. A stochastic process moderates temporal properties while a Bayesian model assigns behavioral attributes. The synthetic traffic impacts the performance of web server caches in similar ways as real robot traffic. Well done Kyle!

7/3/17:Explaining Trained Neural Networks with Semantic Web Technologies: First Steps accepted at the International Workshop on Neural-Symbolic Learning and Reasoning 2017. This paper documents our first (successful) efforts and attaching semantically driven explanations about why a deep network reaches a decision in scene classification tasks.

6/19/17:Seasonality in Dynamic Stochastic Blockmodels accepted at the Workshop on Complex Methods for Data and Web Mining at IEEE/ACM Web Intelligence 2017. This work introduces a new staitsical network model where edge formation probabilities depend on the `type' of each node and on seasonal time series processes that a latent in data. An inference procedure to recover the latent seasonal processes from data is also validated. This is Jace's first publication with WaCS!

6/5/17: A Soft Computing Approach for Benign and Malicious Web Robot Detection accepted in the journal Expert Systems with Applications. The article describes a new approach to detect Web robot sessions from web logs. By fuzzy set theory and Markov clustering, the approach selects an appropriate set of classification features, thereby adapting to server-specific session level patterns automatically. This is Mahdieh's first publication with WaCS!

5/22/17: WaCS student Matt Piekenbrock receives well deserved press from the university. See the article here!

5/5/17: Matt Piekenbrock's proposal to the 2017 Google Summer of Code was accepted! Matt will be funded by Google to implement an open-source R package that unifies and improves algorithms for estimating the empirical cluster tree of a dataset. The package will be a realization of recent, rapid advances in density-based clustering. The proposal selection process is very competitive. Congratulations Matt!

4/1/17: Dr. Doran's brief monograph Network Role Mining and Analysis has been publised under Springer's Briefs in Complexity series. The book gives an overview of historical, classic, and modern methods for the node role discovery problem in networks.

3/7/17: EmojiNet: An Open Service and API for Emoji Sense Discovery, accepted at the AAAI Intl. Conference on Weblogs and Social Media. This work describes the release of our public knowledge base for interpreting the sense, or meaningful interpretation, of emoji when used in a particular context. Applications to emoji sense disambiguation and similarity evluation is discussed. Check out the resource here -- well done Sanjaya and Lakshika!

2/1/17: A Soft Computing Prefetcher to Mitigate Cache Degradation by Web Robots, accepted at the 2017 Intl. Symposium on Neural Networks. This work introduces our new prefetcher for web resources requested by robots or crawlers, which combines a deep recurrent neural network with Bayesian networks that combine prior global information with session-specific information about a robot. Ning and Kyle are joint first authors on this work!

1/17/17: Dr. Doran's book chapter on Graph/Link Mining has been accepted for inclusion in Springer's upcoming Encyclopedia of Big Data. The chapter covers an introduction to graph mining for a non-technical expert, relates graph mining techniques to the scientific field of network science, and presents other fundamental concepts and graph mining techniques.

12/20/16: Ning Xie wins two scholarships to attend important events for women in computing: the CRA-W Grad Cohort Workshop in Washington, DC and the Ohio Celebration of Women in Computing at Lake Huron in Ohio. Congratulations Ning!

12/15/16: Nathan Rude successfully defends his MS Thesis Intelligent Caching to Mitigate the Impact of Web Robots on Web Servers. He will be taking a job as a Software Engineer for data intensive computing at LexisNexis Special Services this January.
**Congratulations Nathan!!**

12/13/16: Samir Yelne successfully defends his MS Thesis Measures of User Interactions, Conversations, and Attacks in a Crowdsourced Platform Offering Emotional Support. He will be taking a job as a Data Scientist at Cisco in San Jose, CA this January.
**Congratulations Samir!!**

10/20/16: Keep the Conversation Going: Engagement-Based Customer Segmentation on Online Social Service Platforms, accepted in the journal Information Systems Frontiers. This work integrates kernel functions into the traditional k-means clustering algorithm to segment customers on online platforms having social functions (heavy-tails abound). Nripesh is first author on this work and represents his work during his Summer 2015 WaCS visit!

10/1/16: WaCS is awarded a research award from the Ohio Federal Research Network titled Human Centered Big Data. This project is in collaboration with the DaSE and BiRG labs at Wright State, as well as the Wright State Research Institute, Case Western University, and the Ohio State University.

9/28/16: RFID-Based Information Visibility for Hospital Operations: Exploring its Positive Effects using Discrete Event Simulation, accepted in the journal Health Care Management Science. This article presents a simulation-based performance analysis of hospitals wherein patients visit stations that have visible waiting times. Nathan played a major role in this collaborative work between WaCS and the Dept. of Information Systems and Supply Chain Management.

8/20/16: EmojiNet: Building a Machine Readable Sense Inventory for Emoji, accepted at SocInfo 2016. This paper introduces a new web resource: a machine readable sense inventory for emoji. EmojiNet integrates multiple emoji lexicographic resources found on the Web along with BabelNet, a comprehensive machine readable sense inventory for words, to infer sense definitions. Lakshika is second author on this work and was instrumental in its development! Check out the resource here!

8/15/16: Ning Xie wins an NSF Travel Fellowship to attend the 12th annual Reasoning Web Summer School in Aberdeen, Scotland. The school will develop her knowledge in data semantics and linked data theory and systems. The school may prove useful in future explorations at the intersection of deep learning and data semantics, and in web traffic and linked data analysis.

7/29/16: WaCS welcomes Jace Robinson (MS) and Ethan Wolfer (UGrad) to our research group.

7/14/16: Finding Street Gang Members on Twitter, accepted at IEEE/ACM ASONAM 2016. This paper proposes a system to automatically identify twitter profiles affiliated with street gangs. Its novelty lies in the use of heterogeneous features, including image tags inferred by a deep neural network, tags from YouTube video links, and emoji use, whch were inferred by an analysis of what may be the largest set of twitter profiles related to gang members. Lakshika is first author on this work!

6/22/16: Word Embeddings to Enhance Twitter Gang Member Profile Identification , accepted at IJCAI Workshop on Semantic Machine Learning. This paper discusses the use of deep learning to map text, extracted from a set of heterogeneous features, into a single space for Twitter profile classification. This is Lakshika's first paper!

4/19/16: Measuring the Users and Conversations of a Vibrant Online Emotional Support System , accepted at IEEE Intl. Symposium on Computers and Communications. This paper follows up our ASONAM 2015 work on studying the users of a large-scale emotional support service and the dynamics of the conversations they hold with each other. Students Samir Yelne and Nripesh Trivedi are co-authors on this work.

4/14/16: Matt Piekenbrock is listed as a co-author of the R package dbscan. The package implements a critical non-parametric clustering algorithm and is downloaded at least 2,300 times per month around the world. Download it from CRAN!

2/3/16: Exploring Information-Optimal Network Discretization for Dynamic Network Analysis, accepted at Sunbelt 2016 . This poster discusses how a notion of entropy defined by the structure of temporal networks may be used to guide the discretization of continuous network data. Sunbelt is the flagship conference for the International Network for Social Network Analysis.

12/14/15: A Runner-up Best Teaching Paper Award is given to Teaching the Foundations of Data Science: An Interdisciplinary Approach at the 2015 SIGDSA Business Analytics Congress!

12/14/15: WaCS welcomes Ning Xie (PhD) and Scott Duberstein (UGrad) to our research group.

12/11/15: Operationalizing Central Place and Central Flow Theory With Mobile Phone Data, accepted in the journal Annals of Data Science. This work demonstrates how artifacts explained by Central Place and Central Flow Theory, which are geographic explanations about how regions develop economically and socially, may be unearthed in mobile phone datasets.

11/16/15: WaCS is awarded an REU Supplement to our NSF project. The funds will support Logan Rickert and a new UGRA to be hired through 2017.

10/15/15: Teaching the Foundations of Data Science: An Interdisciplinary Approach, accepted at 2015 SIGDSA Business Analytics Congress! . This paper documents the design, student experiences, and outcomes of a progressive undergraduate course on data analytics for both CS and MIS students co-taught by Dr. Doran. The Congress is a pre-event of ICIS, the largest professional association for information systems.

9/18/15: Request Type Prediction for Web Robot and Internet of Things Traffic , accepted at IEEE ICMLA 2015. Towards building predictive caches for web servers and clouds that can service robot and IoT traffic with better performance, this work motivates the use of recurrent neural networks to anticipate the type of a resource to be requested by bots or IoT devices. This is Nathan's first publication with WaCS!

9/18/15: WAMINet: An Open Source Library for Dynamic Geospace Analysis Using WAMI , accepted at IEEE ISM 2015. We introduce an open source tool for processing WAMI imagery, and its method to derive network models of the dynamics of a monitored geospace. This is Matt M.'s first publication!

8/31/15: A best paper award at IEEE/ACM ASONAM 2015 awarded to Stay Awhile and Listen: User Interactions in a Crowdsourced Platform Offering Emotional Support!

8/27/15: On the Discovery of Social Roles in Large Scale Social Systems, accepted in the journal Social Network Analysis and Mining. This theoretical work describes an unsupervised, data-driven method to extract the roles of actors in large scale social systems -- an advancement over prior art that defined qualitative analysis or used unscalable mathematical definitions.

7/10/15: Social Media Powered Human Sensing for Smart Cities, accepted in the journal AI Communications. This is an extension of Dr. Doran's 2013 work on social media mining in support of public utilities. This research was carried out in collaboration with industry partners.

6/22/15: Stay Awhile and Listen: User Interactions in a Crowdsourced Platform Offering Emotional Support, accepted at IEEE/ACM ASONAM 2015. This may be the first study that quantitatively measures the behaviors and interactions of people on a large (>100k users) social system designed to offer emotional support to those in need. This is Samir's first publication!

5/12/15: WaCS welcomes Nripesh Trivedi, a visiting student from IIT Varanasi to our research group.