DBChat

dbChat


DBChat is a once per week discussion group for students, faculty and staff who are interested in examining current and emerging topics of interest in the database area and related research in information systems and networking. Topics of discussion include work in progress, interesting papers/articles/... This chat is intended to be completely informal (i.e. no slides) so that it requires little preparation time and attracts more people.

If we have a visitor that week, DBChat may be cancelled.

Upcoming Talks

Title: Toward Scalable Stochastic Flow Algorithms

Speaker: Prof. Srinivasan Parthasarathy, Ohio State University
When/Where: Oct 12, 2011; AVW 1146, 2pm
Abstract: Many real world problems (biological, social, web) can be effectively modeled as networks or graphs where nodes represent entities of interest and edges mimic the interactions or relationships among them. The study of such complex relationship networks, recently referred to as "network science", can provide insight into their structure, properties and emergent behavior. Of particular interest here are rigorous methods for uncovering and understanding important network structures and motifs (communities) at multiple topological and temporal scales. Achieving this objective is challenging due to the presence of noise (false or missing interactions), topological (scale-free)) properties and scalability. Given the importance of the graph clustering problem, a number of solutions ranging from hierarchical methods to spectral methods have been designed and developed. To this mix of graph clustering algorithms one can also include a recent entrant Markov Clustering (MCL) a graph clustering algorithm based on stochastic flow simulation, and the focus of this work.
MCL has several advantages over competing techniques including an inherent simplicity, empirically confirmed robustness to noise effects and relatively non-parametric nature. However, in spite of its popularity in the bioinformatics community MCL has drawn limited attention from the broader social network, web and data mining communities primarily due to its limited scalability. In this talk we present two orthogonal strategies to address this problem - the first relies on developing a new multi-level regularized variant of MCL called MLR-MCL. The second approach focuses on data reduction via graph sparsification, in a manner analogous to the use of sampling, for improving the scalability of such algorithms. Empirical results demonstrate both qualitative as well as quantitive improvements over existing approaches on a wide range of domains.
This is joint work with Venu Satuluri and Yiye Ruan.
Bio: Srinivasan Parthasarathy is a Professor of Computer Science at Ohio State. His research interests are in Data Mining, Systems (broadly defined) and Graph and Network algorithms as they relate to social, biological and web applications. He is a recipient of both the NSF and DOE career awards, multiple research awards from Microsoft, Google and IBM, and multiple best paper awards and nominations from conferences such as IEEE ICDM, SIAM DM, VLDB, SIGKDD, ACM-Bioinformatics and ISMB.

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