[PAST EVENT] Colloquium on March 6 at 8AM in McGl 020

March 6, 2015
8am
Location
McGlothlin-Street Hall, Room 020
251 Jamestown Rd
Williamsburg, VA 23185Map this location
Title: Understanding Social Spammers: A Data Mining Perspective

Speaker: Xia Hu, Arizona State University

Abstract: With the growing popularity of social media, social spamming has become rampant on all platforms. Many (fake) accounts, known as social spammers, are employed to overwhelm legitimate users with unwanted information. Social spammers are unique due to their coordinated efforts to launch attacks such as distributing ads to generate sales, disseminating pornography and viruses, executing phishing attacks, or simply sabotaging a system's reputation. In this talk, I will introduce a novel and systematic analysis of social spammers from a data mining perspective to tackle the challenges raised by social media data for spammer detection. Specifically, I will formally define the problem of social spammer detection and discuss the unique properties of social media data that make this problem challenging. By analyzing the two most important types of information, network and content information, I will introduce a unified framework by collectively using heterogeneous information in social media. To tackle the labeling bottleneck in social media, I will show how we can take advantage of the existing information about spam in email, SMS, and on the web for spammer detection in microblogging. I will also present a solution for efficient online processing to handle fast-evolving social spammers.

Biography: Xia Hu is a Ph.D. candidate in Computer Science and Engineering at Arizona State University, supervised by Professor Huan Liu. His research interests include data mining, machine learning, social network analysis, etc. As a result of his research work, he has published nearly 40 papers in several major academic venues, including WWW, SIGIR, KDD, WSDM, IJCAI, AAAI, CIKM, SDM, etc. One of his papers was selected for the Best Paper Shortlist in WSDM'13. He is the recipient of IEEE Atluri Award Scholarship, 2014 ASU's President's Award for Innovation, and Faculty Emeriti Fellowship. He has served on program committees for several major conferences such as WWW, IJCAI, SDM and ICWSM, and reviewed for multiple journals, including IEEE TKDE, ACM TOIS and Neurocomputing. His research attracts wide range of external government and industry sponsors, including NSF, ONR, AFOSR, Yahoo!, and Microsoft.
Contact

[[cs|gzhou, Gang Zhou]]