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About me
Hello there! My name is Vagelis Papalexakis (my 'official' name is Evangelos, but nobody really calls me that) and I come from the beautiful city of Athens, Greece. I received my Electronic & Computer Engineering Diploma and M.Sc at the Technical University of Crete in Chania, under the supervision of Professor Nikos Sidiropoulos. I received my Ph.D from the Computer Science Department of Carnegie Mellon University under the supervision of Professor Christos Faloutsos.Currently, I am an Assistant Professor at the Computer Science & Engineering Department at the University of California Riverside, working broadly on data mining, machine learning, and data science research. You can get a quick idea about my research by browsing through my list of publications.
A major focus of my research is tensor decompositions for machine learning and data science. In order to get a better idea of this research area, feel free to check out two relevant recent surveys that I have co-authored: one geared more towards data science practitioners and one geared more towards the fundamental concepts necessary to start algorithmic research in the area.
News and travel
- March 2021: Gave a remote guest lecture at Eastvale STEM Academcy eSTEM Virtual Expo
- January 2021:Gave a remote guest lecture/talk at Northeastern University, NetSI Machine Learning with Graphs Seminar, hosted by Tina Eliassi-Rad
- November 2020:Gave a remote invited talk at the One World Signal Processing Seminar Series. Video of the talk is also available
- November 2020:Gave a remote invited talk at the AAAI 2020 Fall Symposium on Physics-Guided AI to Accelerate Scientific Discovery
- September 2020: Gave a remote colloqium talk at Rochester Institute of Technology, hosted by Panos Markopoulos
- September 2020:Gave a remote talk at Instacart, hosted by Haixun Wang
- August 2020: Gave a remote talk at the ECE TUC Virtual Summer School on Data Analysis 2020
- March 2020: Gave a remote talk at Microsoft Bing Ads Bay Area, hosted by Rukmini Iyer
- February 2020: Attended ITA 2020 in San Diego, WSDM 2020 in Houston, and SIAM PP 2020 in Seattle.
- December 2019: Represented UCR and talked about AI research in UCR and my group as part of a UC Congressional Briefing on AI, to members of Congress and staffers
- December 2019: Gave a keynote at the GTA3 workshop on Graph techniques for adversarial analytics at IEEE Big Data in Los Angeles
- November 2019: Attended EMNLP 2019 in Hong Kong and helped present our paper on small-sample humor recognition using tensor embeddings
- October 2019: While in Pittsburgh, I attended and presented at IEEE MLSP and gave a talk at CMU.
- September 2019: Visited East China Normal University, ByteDance, Shanghai Jiao Tong, Fudan, and Shanghai Tech, in Shanghai, as part of a UCR-China Collaboration grant
- September 2019: Gave an invited talk at the AI and Tensor Factorizations for Physical, Chemical, and Biological Systems workshop in Santa Fe, New Mexico
- September 2019: Gave a Data Science Seminar talk at Facebook HQ
- August 2019: Co-organizing a KDD 2019 Workshop on Tensor Methods for Emerging Data Science Challenges, in Achorage, Alaska.
- August 2019: Giving a keynote talk at the KDD 2019 Workshop on Machine Learning with Graphs.
- August 2019: Awarded NSF Award III: Medium: Efficient Collaborative Perception over Controllable Agent Networks as a co-PI.
- July 2019: Particpated in the Naval Engineering Education Consortium (NEEC) Day 2019 at Newport, Rhode Island
- July 2019: Received the best poster award at the 2019 International Conference on Data Intelligence and Security for our work on visualizing and understanding deep Convolutional Neural Networks using Factorization.
- June 2019: Received the UCR Regents Faculty Fellowship to work on Data Science methods for Fake News Detection.
- June 2019: Featured in the "On the Radar" section of the Inland Empire Magazine.
- April 2019: Spoke to The Guardian regarding the YouTube explainer panel during the Notre Dame fire and the Sri Lanka social media blackout.
- April 2019: Visited Georgia Tech and attended Kimis Perros' defense as a committee member and gave a invited talk.
- February 2019: Gave an invited talk at Amazon in Seattle, WA.
- February 2019: Gave an invited talk at SIAM CSE 2019 in Spokane, WA.
- January 2019: Serving as Deep Learning Day Co-Chair at KDD 2019.
- January 2019: Visited and gave talks at a number of universities and companies in China as part of the UCR-China Collaboration Program. ByteDance gave me the honorary title of "CTO" (Chief Tensor Officer)!
- December 2018: I was hosted by Noah Kravitz for the NVIDIA AI Podcast and talked about our work on Fake News.
- December 2018: Attended NeurIPS 2018 in Montreal, Canada, and presented our paper at the NeurIPS 18 Workshop on Integration of Deep Learning Theories
- November 2019: Co-organized the Tensor Methods for Signal Processing and Machine Learning" symposium at IEEE GlobalSIP 2018 in Anaheim, CA.
- November 2018: Visited Imperial College London as a committee member of Jean Kossaifi's PhD thesis defense, and gave a talk.
- September 2018: Received an Collaborative Award from NSF with Rochester Institute of Technology: Collaborative Research: CDS&E: Theoretical Foundations and Algorithms for L1-Norm-Based Reliable Multi-Modal Data Analysis
- August 2018: Attending ASONAM 2018 in Barcelona, Spain, presenting four papers
- August 2018: Attending KDD 2018 in London, UK. We have two papers in the main conference and three workshop papers.
- August 2018: Two papers accepted in CIKM 2018!
- August 2018: Our work on Fake News and Misinformation on the Web and our collaboration with Snap Inc. was featured in an article by Digital Trends.
- August 2018: Featured in a mini-interview in Kathimerini, one of the biggest newspapers in Greece, regarding Greece's brain-drain in academia.
- July 2018: Our work on Fake News and Misinformation on the Web is featured in an article by Science News.
- July 2018: Participating in the ECE TUC graduates in the Academic World Summer School in Chania, Crete, Greece. Our participation was covered by Haniotika Nea.
- June 2018: Received another NVIDIA GPU Grant!
- June 2018: Received a gift from Snap Inc. !
- June 2018: Two papers accepted at ECML-PKDD 2018 in Dublin, Ireland!!
- June 2018: Giving a talk at TRICAP 2018 in Angel Fire, New Mexico
- May 2018: Giving a talk at SIAM Conference on Applied Linear Algebra in Hong Kong
- April 2018: Co-PI in a Technological Pathways Initiative grant aimed to designing an undergraduate program in data science to foster diversity in computing
- March 2018: I was interviewed by The Press Enterprise for an article about our fake news detection work
- February 2018: Invited to present at ITA 2018 in San Diego.
- February 2018: Our fake news work at WSDM 2018 MIS2: Misinformation and Misbehavior Mining on the Web Workshop won the best paper award!
- February 2018: Attending WSDM 2018 in LA, presenting a tutorial on sports analytics and various workshop papers.
- December 2017: Two papers accepted at SIAM SDM 2018, one on semi-supervised community detection and one on scalable incremental tensor decomposition!
- December 2017: Received a NVIDIA GPU Grant!
- November 2017: Attending ICDM 2017 in New Orleans, and giving an invited keynote at the ACUMEN 2017 : Data Science for Human Performance in Social Networks Workshop.
- October 2017: Attending ICCV 2017 in Venice, Italy, and giving an invited talk at the Matrix and Tensor Factorization Methods in Computer Vision Workshop.
- October 2017: Attending Asilomar 2017 and presenting work on tensor rank estimation.
- September 2017: Received a Data Science Research Faculty Award by Adobe!
- September 2017: Received a NSF EAGER award titled Joint Modeling and Querying of Social Media and Video Data with Vagelis Hristidis, Amit Roy-Chowdhury, and Vassilis Tsotras.
- August 2017: Received a Naval Engineering Education Consurtium (NEEC) grant titled Big Multi-Aspect Data Mining via Scalable and Incremental Tensor Decompositions and Applications to Social Network Analysis
- August 2017: My PhD thesis won the runner-up SIGKDD 2017 Doctoral Dissertation Award!
- August 2017: Attending KDD 2017 in Halifax, Canada.
- August 2017: Attending ASONAM 2017 in Sydney, Australia, presenting three papers (p1, p2, p3) with students and collaborators at UCR
- July 2017: Attending CVPR 2017 in Honolulu, Hawaii, presenting work with my student at the Tensor Methods in Computer Vision Workshop.
- May 2017: Attended the Second Workshop on Mission Critical Big Data Analytics (MCDBA) and gave an invited talk.
- March 2017: The first paper out of my graduate data mining class at UCR (CS235) was accepted for presentation at IEEE Innovative Smart Grid Technologies Conference.
- March 2017 Attended IEEE ICASSP 2017 in New Orleans and delivered a tutorial on Tensors for Signal Processing and Machine Learning.
- September 2016: Selected among the "20 rising stars" of the KDD community by Microsoft Research Asia and Microsoft Academic Search! See also the Weibo post
UPDATE: Links seem to be offline, you can find archived versions here: Weibo post, Weibo post translated, List. - September 2016: Invited to give a keynote talk at the Tensor-Learn Workshop at NIPS'16 in Barcelona in December
- August 2016: Attended KDD 2016 and ASONAM 2016 in San Francisco
- May 2016: My SDM'16 paper Automatic Unsupervised Tensor Mining with Quality Assessment won Best Student Paper Award!!!
- May 2016: Won the NSF Travel Award for SIAM SDM 2016 in Miami, FL.
- April 2016: Attended PAKDD in Auckland, New Zealand.
- April 2016: Attended Dagstuhl Perspecives Workshop on Tensor Computing for Internet of Things in Dagstuhl, Germany.
- January 2016: Paper Automatic Unsupervised Tensor Mining with Quality Assessment accepted at SIAM SDM 2016
- December 2015: Attended IEEE CAMSAP 2015 in Cancun, Mexico.
- November 2015: Attended ICDM 2015 in Atlantic City, NJ.
- November 2015: Gave an invited tech talk at Facebook HQ in Menlo Park, CA, hosted by Sofus Macskassy.
- November 2015: Attending COSN 2015 and presenting a poster titled: Overlap Between Google and Bing Web Search Results! Twitter to the Rescue?
- October 2015: Gave an invited talk at Rutgers (hosted by Tina Eliassi-Rad).
- October 2015: Attended the WIN 2015 workshop and presented a talk titled GeoTense: Spotting Patterns in Geo-Social Networks with Tensors and a poster titled Overlap Between Google and Bing Web Search Results! Twitter to the Rescue?.
- August 2015: Attended VLDB 2015 and presented at the PhD Workshop.
- August 2015: Visited Beijing, China and gave invited talks at Tsinghua University (hosted by Peng Cui), Chinese Academy of Sciences (hosted by Ping Luo), and Microsoft Research Asia (hosted by Yu Zheng).
- August 2015: Attended KDD 2015 and presented our paper titled Whither Social Networks for Web Search?
- August 2015: Finished my summer internship at Google Research at the Structured Data Group