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There is now a CONTENT FREEZE for Mercury while we switch to a new platform. It began on Friday, March 10 at 6pm and will end on Wednesday, March 15 at noon. No new content can be created during this time, but all material in the system as of the beginning of the freeze will be migrated to the new platform, including users and groups. Functionally the new site is identical to the old one. webteam@gatech.edu
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Committee:
Dr. Duen Horng (Polo) Chau, School of Computational Science and Engineering (Advisor) Dr. Shamkant B. Navathe, School of Computer Science (Co-Advisor) Dr. Munmun De Choudhury, School of Interactive Computing Dr. Rahul C. Basole, School of Interactive Computing Dr. Kevin A. Roundy, Symantec Research Labs
Abstract:
Graphs (or networks) are now omnipresent, infusing into many aspects of society. This dissertation contributes unified graph-based algorithms and models to help solve large-scale societal problems affecting millions of individuals' daily lives, from cyber-attacks involving malware to tobacco and alcohol addiction. The main thrusts of our research are:
(1) Propagation-based Graph Mining Algorithms: We develop graph mining algorithms to propagate information between the nodes to infer important details about the unknown nodes. We present three examples: AESOP (patented) unearths malware lurking in people's computers with a 99.61% true positive rate at 0.01% false positive rate; our application of ADAGE on malware detection (patent-pending) enables to detect malware in a streaming setting, and EDOCS (patent-pending) flags comment spammers among 197 thousand users on a social media platform accurately and preemptively.
(2) Graph-induced Behavior Characterization: We derive new insights and knowledge that characterize certain behavior from graphs using statistical and algorithmic techniques. We present two examples: a study on identifying attributes of smoking and drinking abstinence and relapse from an addiction cessation social media community; and an exploratory analysis of how company insiders trade.
Our work has already made impact to society: deployed by Symantec, AESOP is protecting over 120 million people worldwide from malware; EDOCS has been deployed by Yahoo and is guarding multiple online communities from comment spammers.
