Conte Distinguished Lecture Series Begins -- New Mining Techniques Explored and Excavated

10-25-2013

Writer(s): Jesica E. Hollinger

"Graph Optimization Problems in Data Mining" will be the first presentation of the 2013-2014 Sam Conte Distinguished Lecture Series presented by Paul M. Van Dooren, professor of mathematical engineering at Catholic University in Louvain at 3:30 p.m. Monday, Oct. 28 in room 1142 of the Lawson Computer Science building.

In his presentation, Van Dooren will present graph-theoretic ideas useful in understanding modern large-scale data mining techniques. He will also share ideas from optimization that are useful in understanding the numerical behavior of the corresponding algorithms. He illustrates this claim by looking at two specific graph theoretic problems and their applications in data mining. The first problem is that of reputation systems, where the reputation of objects and voters on the web are estimated, while the second problem is of estimating the similarity of nodes of large graphs. These two problems are also illustrated using concrete applications in data mining.

During his distinguished career, Van Dooren has received the IBM-Belgium Informatics Award in 1974, the Householder Award in 1981, and the SIAM Wilkinson Prize of Numerical Analysis and Scientific Computing in 1989. He is a Fellow of Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) and a Fellow of the Society of Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM), and received the Francqui Chair in Antwerp in 2010. His main interests include numerical linear algebra, systems & control theory, and numerical methods for large graphs and network, and he is an associate editor of several journals in numerical analysis, and systems & control theory.