Title: What is in Common between Evolving Web Clickstreams,  Hot Plasma Loops on the Solar Corona, and Contraband Exchange on P2P Networks? An Overview of Research at the Knowledge Discovery & Web Mining Lab at University of Louisville

Abstract:

Join me on a journey through some of the research projects at the Knowledge Discovery & Web Mining Lab at University of Louisville, as we discover the common theme that led us into fascinating problems touching such diverse concepts as the massive amounts of footprints left behind by surfers on the Web, the violent eruptions of hot plasma that draw beautiful coronal loop structures above the surface of the sun, and the numerous illegal contraband exchanges on unstructured peer to peer networks. Massive amounts of data sets that are being generated by more and more applications represent a wealth of information, and this raw information can be turned into golden knowledge using Data Mining techniques. These data mining techniques are frequently being pushed to the limit by the increasing challenges of huge data sizes, high dimensionality, and evolving behavior. These challenges are at the center of several research endeavors that we have been working on in the past years, and have included adapting ideas inspired by robust statistics, the natural immune system and natural evolution to several machine learning techniques. Applications range from personalizing Websites and Information Retrieval on e-learning platforms to mining coronal loop occurrences on the solar corona, mining evolving topics on the fly from online newsfeeds, and helping catch child pornography creators and consumers on P2P networks.