Four Georgia Tech research hubs have launched a new “chalk & talk” brown bag lunch series on Big Data. The weekly series, sponsored jointly by the Institute for Data & High Performance Computing (IDH), Institute for Materials (IMaT), Center for Data Analytics (CDA) and Center for High Performance Computing (HPC) will be held on most Thursdays during the Fall and Spring Semesters and feature a mix of topics, including those related to big data for materials and manufacturing, as well as other topics critical to the broader area of big data.

All meetings are held on Thursdays during lunchtime. 

Date: January 16
Topic: “Scalable, Interactive, and Comprehensible Tools for Data Analytics”
Presenters(s): Polo Chau

Abstract:

Massive datasets now arise in virtually all domains. Yet, making sense of these data remains a fundamental challenge. At the “Polo Club of Data Science,” we are innovating at the intersection of data mining and human-computer interaction (HCI) to combine the best from both worlds to create scalable, interactive tools for making sense of graphs with billions of nodes and edges.

I will briefly describe some of our latest work, both on-going and published, that aims to tame big data through scalable algorithms, interactive visualization, and comprehensible models (machine learning/data mining) that users can more easily understand and work with.

Bio:

Duen Horng (Polo) Chau is an assistant professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Computational Science and Engineering and an adjunct assistant professor in the School of Interactive Computing. Polo received his Ph.D. from the Machine Learning Department at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) and his Master’s degree in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) from CMU.

Chau solves large-scale, “real world” problems that impact society. His NetProbe auction fraud detection system was featured in The Wall Street Journal and on CNN. His patented Polonium malware detection technology (with Symantec) protects 120 million people worldwide.

Chau’s thesis work received an honorable mention in Carnegie Mellon's School of Computer Science Distinguished Dissertation Award competition. He is the only two-time Symantec fellow, and he received a Yahoo! Key Scientific Challenges Award. Chau contributes to the PEGASUS peta-scale graph mining collaboration, which won an Open Source Software World Challenge Silver Award. He is also an award-winning designer and created Carnegie Mellon’s most recently used ID card design.