Data Science Research in Big Data Era Introduction to Research Seminar, 2017 Peixiang Zhao Department of Computer Science Florida State University zhao@cs.fsu.edu

Synopsis Introduction to Data Sciences How to prepare yourself for (data) research My research portfolio Conclusions

Who am I? Peixiang Zhao Assistant Professor at CS @ FSU Homepage: http://www.cs.fsu.edu/~zhao/ Office: 262 Love Building, FSU Ph.D.: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Aug. 2012 Research Interest: Database, data mining, data-intensive computation and analytics, and Information Network Analysis!

Who am I? Courses I am offering COP4710: Introductory database systems Every fall semester What are databases and how to use databases A programming project on Web-based DB programming CIS 4930: Data Mining COP 5725: Advanced databases systems Every spring semester Database internals and advanced topics, such as MapReduce, data mining and Web search A research/implementation project I am hiring highly-motivated Ph.D. students!

Introduction What are data sciences? The sub-area of computer science dealing with querying, mining, acquisition, and management of data drawn from the real-world applications Include, but are not limited to Database systems Data mining Information retrieval Web technologies Network science Big data http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LrNlZ7-SMPk

Data Sciences Data: Common Tasks: Model: Fully structured or relational, semi-structured, unstructured, schema-less, graphical, …… Format: textual, numeric, categorical, sequential, graph-structured, audio/video, time-series, streaming data Scale: from megabytes to zetabytes Quality, resolution, privacy, usability …… Common Tasks: Data acquisition, sanitation, transformation, storage, maintenance and integration Indexing , querying and ranking Knowledge discovery, mining and machine learning

Data Sciences Skillsets and Requirement Your Bright Future Motivation and passion to work on the state-of-the-art problems Strong mathematical reasoning and algorithm design abilities Good programming skills Your Bright Future DBA at Goldman-Sachs or D. E. Shaw Data scientist at Google, Facebook, Twitter or Foursquare Data engineering at Oracle, IBM or Microsoft Researcher at MSR, IBM Research or Yahoo! Labs Professor in SIGMOD, VLDB, KDD or SIGIR

How to prepare yourself for (data) research What is research? Discover new knowledge Seek answers to non-trivial questions Research Process Identification of the topic (e.g., Web search) Hypothesis formulation (e.g., algorithm X is better than Y=state-of-the-art) Experiment design (measures, data, etc) (e.g., retrieval accuracy on a sample of web data) Test hypothesis (e.g., compare X and Y on the data) Draw conclusions and repeat the cycle of hypothesis formulation and testing if necessary (e.g., Y is better only for some queries, now what?)

Why Research? Funding Curiosity Quality of Life Utility of Applications Advancement of Technology Amount of knowledge Application Development Applied Research Basic Research

What is Good Research? Solid work: A clear hypothesis (research question) with conclusive result (either positive or negative) Clearly adds to our knowledge base (what can we learn from this work?) Implications: a solid, focused contribution is often better than a non-conclusive broad exploration High impact = high-importance-of-problem * high-quality-of-solution high impact = open up an important problem high impact = close a problem with the best solution high impact = major milestones in between Implications: question the importance of the problem and don’t just be satisfied with a good solution, make it the best

Challenge-Impact Analysis Level of Challenges High impact High risk (hard) Good long-term research problems Difficult basic research Problems, but questionable impact High impact Low risk (easy) Good short-term research problems Low impact Low risk Bad research problems (May not be publishable) Good applications Not interesting for research Unknown “entry point” problems Known Impact/Usefulness

How to Do Research in Data Sciences? Curiosity: allow you to ask questions Critical thinking: allow you to challenge assumptions Make sense of what you have read/heard Learning: take you to the frontier of knowledge Start with textbooks and courses Read papers in top-notch conferences/journals Implement your prototype ideas Persistence: so that you don’t give up Respect data and truth: ensure your research is solid Don’t throw away negative results Communication: publish and present your work

How to Find Problems? Driven by new data: X is a new type of data emerging (e.g., X= blog vs. news) How is X different from existing types of data? What new issues/problems are raised by X? Are existing methods sufficient for solving old problems on X? If not, what are the new challenges? Driven by new users: Y is a set of new users (e.g., ordinary people vs. librarians) How are the new users different from old ones? What new needs do they have? Can existing methods work well to satisfy their needs? If not, what are the new challenges? Driven by new tasks (not necessarily new users or new data): Z is a new task (e.g., social networking, online shopping) What information management functions are needed to better support Z? Can these new functions reduced to old ones? If not, what are the new challenges?

Tuning the Problem Unknown Known Level of Challenges Make an easy problem harder Increase impact (more general) Make a hard problem easier Unknown Known Impact/Usefulness

Where to Publish? Databases Data Mining Information Retrieval SIGMOD, VLDB, ICDE ACM TODS, VLDB J., IEEE TKDE Data Mining KDD, ICDM, SDM ACM TKDD Information Retrieval SIGIR, CIKM ACM TOIS Web & Applications WWW, WSDM

My Research Portfolio What are information networks? A large number of interacting physical, conceptual, and human/societal entities Entities are interconnected with relationships Information networks are ubiquitous Technological networks Social networks Biomedical, biochemical and ecological networks The Web …… Information networks have formed a critical component of modern information infrastructure

Real-world Information Networks The network structure of the Internet Opte Project (http://www.opte.org/maps/) Entities: class C subnets Relationship: data packet routes Citation Networks (http://bluwiki.com/go/Citation) Entities: 5199 papers from SIGOPS, SIGPLAN, SIGART Relationship: 5343 citations Yeast protein interaction network(baker’s yeast) (http://www.bordalierinstitute.com/) Twitter network (http://yoan.dosimple.ch/blog/)

Information Networks: Model and Characteristics An information network can be modeled as a graph comprising both vertices and edges G = (V, E) A real-world information network is massive (Jun. 2012) Web graph: 8.94 billion pages Facebook: 901 million active users and 125 billion friendship relations dynamic Facebook U.S. grows 149% in 2009

Querying Information Networks Motivation The most natural and easiest approach to managing and accessing information networks is querying! Neighborhood query, keyword query, reachability query, shortest-path query, graph query, frequency estimation query, …… Challenges The massive and dynamic nature of information networks precludes the direct application of most well-studied, memory-resident graph algorithms! Who are my friends in Google+? Graph query: find all protein substructures containing an α-β-barrel motif in a protein-to-protein interaction network. Gene Coexpression Network Alignment and Conservation of Gene Modules between Two Grass Species: Maize and Rice Frequency query: find the heavy hitters of IP-networks with abnormal frequency behavior …… Which university is UIUC? What is the shorest route between UIUC and FSU? What are the largest phenotypic associations between rice and maize?

My Focus and Solutions Efficient, cost-effective and potentially scalable solutions Queries gSketch Frequency Estimation Graph Cube OLAP Aggregation Tree+δ Subgraph Matching P-Rank SPath Structural Similarity SimQuery Information networks Unlabeled/ Labeled Disconnected/ Connected Unidimensional/ Multidimensional Static/ Dynamic

My Other Work Location-based mining and ranking Text mining Mining large-scale information networks Mining structural patterns Industry-strength systems Hadoop-ML at IBM research Trinity at Microsoft research

Grand Challenges in Data Science Models and representations Text, HTML/XML data, relational data, graph/network, image, animation/video An internet of (homogeneous/heterogeneous) things Magnitude and complexity Big data is a big deal NCSA example: First 19 years: 1 PB; Year 20 (2007): 2 PB; Year 21 (2008): 4 PB; By 2020: ~20 Exabytes? Resolution and granularity Quality and reliability

Future Research Agenda Foundations and models of Information Networks Model, manage and access multi-genre heterogeneous information networks Querying and mining volatile, noisy and uncertain information networks Cyber-physical information networks Efficient and scalable computation in Information Networks A unified declarative language for graph and network data A distributed graph computational framework for large-scale information networks Knowledge discovery in large Information Networks

Conclusions We are in an information network era! Internet, social networks, collaboration and recommender networks, public health-care networks, technological/biological networks …… Data are pervasive, big, and of great value Research in data sciences is interesting and highly rewarding Follow your heart and don’t give up!

Good Luck! Q & A