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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 recently 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 research statement or 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.
An exciting new direction of research in our lab is drawing connections between matrix and tensor decompositions and deep learning. In particular, in recent works (KDD 18 Deep Learning Day, NeurIPS 18 Workshop on Integration of Deep Learning Theories) we show preliminary results on visualizing and characterizing the complexity of a deep convolutional neural network using matrix and tensor decomposition. Stay tuned for more!
News and upcoming travel
- 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