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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 Associate Professor and the Ross Family Chair 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.
My work has attracted a number of distinctions, including the 2017 SIGKDD Dissertation Award (runner-up), the National Science Foundation CAREER award, the 2021 IEEE DSAA Next Generation Data Scientist Award, and the ICDM 2022 Tao Li Award which awards excellence in early-career researchers.
News and travel
- August 2024 New NSF grant in close collaboration with The University of Texas Rio Grande Valley: CISE MSI: RPEP: CPS: Trustworthy AI for Transportation Cyber-Physical Systems
- July 2024 Co-organized for the 4th year in a row the Data Science Challenge with Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory!
- July 2024 Excited to attend and give an invited talk at the 2024 Graph Exploitation Symposium (GraphEx) on Generating Low Rank Graphs
- July 2024 Excited to co-organize the 2024 Data Science High School Summer Camp at UCR!
- July 2024 Honored to be appointed the Ross Family Chair in Computer Science
- May 2024 Delighted to give a remote keynote talk at the TrustLOG@WWW workshop collocated with The Web Conference
- April 2024 Attended and chaired SIAM SDM 2024 and presented one paper
- March 2024 Delighted to give a remote talk to the Warner Bros Discovery AI & ML Tech Talk Series!
- March 2024 Two papers to appear at the Short Paper Track of The Web Conference 2024! One paper in collaboration with Seekr and deals with tensor-based multi-modal news categorization, and the other paper is introducing a GPT text detection benchmark and a tensor-based method.
- February 2024Attended the Information Theory and Applications (ITA) Workshop in San Diego and presented work on Low-Rank Approximation and Robustness
- October 2023 Super excited and honored to be co-organizing IEEE DSAA 2024 in San Diego next October!
- August 2023 Attended KDD’24 in Long Beach! Co-organized the first Southern California Data Science Symposium, as part KDD’24, which was a great success with invited speakers and contributed poster presentations!
- July 2023: Delivered a week-long seminar on AI and Data Science to Redlands Unified School District students!
- July 2023: Excited to see our book chapter on Machine Learning for Complex Instrument Design and Optimization being published!
- July 2023: Our 2023 iteration of the Data Science Challenge with Lawrence Livermore National Lab and UC Merced was a great success!
- June 2023: Visited Université Paris Cité, Laboratory of Informatics Paris Descartes (LIPADE) and gave a keynote talk as part of the 8th LIPADE Day
- June 2023: Attended ICASSP’23 and participated in the awards ceremony for the IEEE Signal Processing Society Donald G. Gink Overview Paper Award.
- May 2023: Extremely honored and excited to be the General Co-Chair for SIAM Data Mining (SDM) 2024!
- May 2023: Attended the kick-off meeting of our University Transportation Center at the USDOT in Washington DC, and was very honored to meet USDOT Research and Technology Deputy Assistant Secretary and Chief Science Office Robert C. Hampshire
- February 2023: Extremely honored that our Tensor survey paper is the recipient of the IEEE Signal Processing Society Donald G. Fink Overview Paper Award which "honors the authors of a journal article that has had substantial impact over several years on a subject related to the Signal Processing Society's technical scope"!
- February 2023: Excited and honored to be part of a funded University Transportation Center (UTC) grant by the US Department of Transportation led by The University of Texas Rio-Grande Valley, focusing on Railway Safety!
- December 2022: Extremely honored to be the recipient of the 2022 ICDM Tao Li Award which rewards excellent early career researchers in data mining
- September 2022: Paper "TENALIGN: Joint Tensor Alignment and Coupled Factorization" accepted as full paper at IEEE ICDM 2022
- September 2022: Paper "APTERA: Automatic PARAFAC2 Tensor Analysis" accepted at ASONAM 2022
- September 2022: Paper "TensorShield: Tensor-Based Defense Against Adversarial Attacks on Images" accepted at MILCOM 2022
- September 2022: Paper on "Multi-aspect Matrix Factorization based Visualization of Convolutional Neural Networks" accepted at IEEE DSAA 2022
- August 2022: Paper on "Unsupervised Multiview Embedding of Node Embeddings" accepted at Asilomar
- August 2022: Attended KDD 2022! Great to be back in person!!
- June 2022: Gave a talk at CISCO Research
- March 2022: Received a Cisco Research Faculty Award
- March 2022: Gave a talk at Megagon Labs.
- February 2022: Gave a talk at the ML Seminar at Vanderbilt University.
- November 2021 Started as Editor-in-Chief for Elsevier Big Data Research
- October 2021Received the 2021 IEEE DSAAA Next Generation Data Scientist Award!
- October 2021Our collaboration paper with Instacart on tensor-based complementary basket recommendation was accepted at IEEE BigData 2021
- October 2021 New NSF award (as subaward from University of Texas Rio Grande Valley): NSF CREST - Center for Multidisciplinary Research Excellence in Cyber-Physical Infrastructure Systems (MECIS)
- September 2021Received a NSF award from the Advancing Discovery with AI-Powered Tools (ADAPT) in the Mathematical and Physical Sciences" program titled EAGER: ADAPT: Understanding Nonlinear Noise in LIGO: A Machine Learning Approach"!
- August 2021Super excited to be Program Chair for SIAM International Conference on Data Mining (SDM) 2022, with Matteo Riondato!
- August 2021Co-organizing a Data Science Challenge with Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory on ML/Data Science for near-Earth object detection and planetary defense!
- August 2021: Two papers (Niche Detection in User Content Consumption Data and Mining Bursty Groups from Interaction Data) accepted at CIKM!
- July 2021: New NSF CNS grant on Scalable Learning from Distributed Data for Wireless Network Management!
- June 2021: Received the Bourns College of Engineering (BCOE) Distinguished Teaching Award for 2021!
- June 2021: As of July 1, 2021, I will be an Associate Professor with tenure at the CSE department at UCR!
- June 2021: Received the NSF CAREER Award on Autonomous Tensor Analysis: From Raw Multi-Aspect Data to Actionable Insights!
- June 2021: Gave a remote talk at the In-Service Engineering Agent of the Future Data Science Virtual Forum organized by NSWC Corona.
- 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: Featured in a mini-interview in Kathimerini, one of the biggest newspapers in Greece, regarding Greece's brain-drain in academia.
- 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: 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