SIGKDD Awards

ACM SIGKDD dissertation awards recognize outstanding work done by graduate students in the areas of data science, machine learning and data mining. The original call for nomination is available here.

Review Criteria:

• Relevance of the Dissertation to KDD
• Originality of the Main Ideas in the Dissertation
• Significance of Scientific Contributions
• Technical Depth and Soundness of Dissertation (including experimental methodologies, theoretical results, etc.)
• Overall Presentation and Readability of Dissertation (including organization, writing style and exposition, etc.)

Congratulations to all the outstanding students who were nominated and to the winners of this year.

Following are the granted awards, including one winner, one runner-up, and two honorable mentions.

WINNER

Data Science for Human Well-Being
Tim Althof (Student and Jure Leskovec (Advisor) at Stanford

Abstract: The popularity of wearable and mobile devices, including smartphones and smartwatches, has generated an explosion of detailed behavioral data. These massive digital traces provide us with an unparalleled opportunity to realize new types of scientific approaches that enable novel insights about our lives, health, and happiness. However, gaining actionable insights from these data requires new computational approaches that turn observational, scientifically “weak” data into strong scientific results and can computationally test domain theories at scale.

In this dissertation, we describe novel computational methods that leverage digital activity traces at the scale of billions of actions taken by millions of people. These methods combine insights from data mining, social network analysis, and natural language processing to improve our understanding of physical and mental well-being: (1) We show how massive digital activity traces reveal unknown health inequality around the world, and (2) how personalized predictive models can support targeted interventions to combat this inequality. (3) We demonstrate that modeling the speed of user search engine interactions can improve our understanding of sleep and cognitive performance. (4) Lastly, we describe how natural language processing methods can help improve counseling services for millions of people in crisis.

RUNNER UP

Multidimensional Mining of Unstructured Data with Limited Supervision
Chao Zhang (Student) and Jiawei Han (Advisory) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Abstract: As one of the most important data forms, unstructured text data plays a crucial role in data-driven decision making in domains ranging from social networking and information retrieval to healthcare and scientific research. In many emerging applications, people’s information needs from text data are becoming multi-dimensional—they demand useful insights for multiple aspects from the given text corpus. However, turning massive text data into multi-dimensional knowledge remains a challenge that cannot be readily addressed by existing data mining techniques.

In this thesis, we propose algorithms that turn unstructured text data into multi-dimensional knowledge with limited supervision. We investigate two core questions: 

1. How to identify task-relevant data with declarative queries in multiple dimensions? 
2. How to distill knowledge from data in a multi-dimensional space?

To address the above questions, we propose an integrated cube construction and exploitation framework. First, we develop a cube construction module that organizes unstructured data into a cube structure, by discovering latent multi-dimensional and multi-granular structure from the unstructured text corpus and allocating documents into the structure. Second, we develop a cube exploitation module that models multiple dimensions in the cube space, thereby distilling multi-dimensional knowledge from data to provide insights along multiple dimensions. Together, these two modules constitute an integrated pipeline: leveraging the cube structure, users can perform multi-dimensional, multi-granular data selection with declarative queries; and with cube exploitation algorithms, users can make accurate cross-dimension predictions or extract multi-dimensional patterns for decision making. 

The proposed framework has two distinctive advantages when turning text data into multi-dimensional knowledge: flexibility and label-efficiency. First, it enables acquiring multi-dimensional knowledge flexibly, as the cube structure allows users to easily identify task-relevant data along multiple dimensions at varied granularities and further distill multi-dimensional knowledge. Second, the algorithms for cube construction and exploitation require little supervision; this makes the framework appealing for many applications where labeled data are expensive to obtain.

HONORABLE MENTION

Towards a Near Universal Time Series Data Mining Tool: Introducing the Matrix Profile
Michael Yeh (Student) and Eamonn Keogh (Advisor) at the University of California - Riverside

Abstract: The last decade has seen a flurry of research on all-pairs-similarity-search (or, self-join) for text, DNA, and a handful of other datatypes, and these systems have been applied to many diverse data mining problems. Surprisingly, however, little progress has been made on addressing this problem for time series subsequences. In this thesis, we have introduced a near universal time series data mining tool called matrix profile which solves the all-pairssimilarity-search problem and caches the output in an easy-to-access fashion. The proposed algorithm is not only parameter-free, exact and scalable, but also applicable for both single and multidimensional time series. By building time series data mining methods on top of matrix profile, many time series data mining tasks (e.g., motif discovery, discord discovery, shapelet discovery, semantic segmentation, and clustering) can be efficiently solved. Because the same matrix profile can be shared by a diverse set of time series data mining methods, matrix profile is versatile and computed-once-use-many-times data structure. We demonstrate the utility of matrix profile for many time series data mining problems, including motif discovery, discord discovery, weakly labeled time series classification, and representation learning on domains as diverse as seismology, entomology, music processing, bioinformatics, human activity monitoring, electrical power-demand monitoring, and medicine. We hope the matrix profile is not the end but the beginning of many more time series data mining projects

HONORABLE MENTION

Fast, Scalable, and Accurate Algorithms for Time-Series Analysis
Ioannis (John) Paparrizos (Student) and Luis Gravano (Advisor) at Columbia University

Abstract: Time is a critical element for the understanding of natural processes (e.g., earthquakes and weather) or human-made artifacts (e.g., stock market and speech signals). The analysis of time series, the result of sequentially collecting observations of such processes and artifacts, is becoming increasingly prevalent across scientific and industrial applications. The extraction of non-trivial features (e.g., patterns, correlations, and trends) in time series is a critical step for devising effective time-series mining methods for real-world problems and the subject of active research for decades. In this dissertation, we address this fundamental problem by studying and presenting computational methods for efficient unsupervised learning of robust feature representations from time series. Our objective is to (i) simplify and unify the design of scalable and accurate time-series mining algorithms; and (ii) provide a set of readily available tools for effective time-series analysis. We focus on applications operating solely over time-series collections and on applications where the analysis of time series complements the analysis of other types of data, such as text and graphs. 

For applications operating solely over time-series collections, we propose a generic computational framework, GRAIL, to learn low-dimensional representations that natively preserve the invariances offered by a given time-series comparison method. GRAIL represents a departure from classic approaches in the time-series literature where representation methods are agnostic to the similarity function used in subsequent learning processes. GRAIL relies on the attractive idea that once we construct the data-to-data similarity matrix most timeseries mining tasks can be trivially solved. To overcome scalability issues associated with approaches relying on such matrices, GRAIL exploits time-series clustering to construct a small set of landmark time series and learns representations to reduce the data-to-data matrix to a data-to-landmark points matrix. To demonstrate the effectiveness of GRAIL, we first present domain-independent, highly accurate, and scalable time-series clustering methods to facilitate exploration and summarization of time-series collections. Then, we show that GRAIL representations, when combined with suitable methods, significantly outperform, in terms of efficiency and accuracy, state-of-the-art methods in major time-series mining tasks, such as querying, clustering, classification, sampling, and visualization. Overall, GRAIL rises as a new primitive for highly accurate, yet scalable, time-series analysis.

For applications where the analysis of time series complements the analysis of other types of data, such as text and graphs, we propose generic, simple, and lightweight methodologies to learn features from time-varying measurements. Such applications often organize operations over different types of data in a pipeline such that one operation provides input— in the form of feature vectors—to subsequent operations. To reason about the temporal patterns and trends in the underlying features, we need to (i) track the evolution of features over different time periods; and (ii) transform these time-varying features into actionable knowledge (e.g., forecasting an outcome). To address this challenging problem, we propose principled approaches to model time-varying features and study two large-scale, real-world, applications. Specifically, we first study the problem of predicting the impact of scientific concepts through temporal analysis of characteristics extracted from the metadata and full text of scientific articles. Then, we explore the promise of harnessing temporal patterns in behavioral signals extracted from web search engine logs for early detection of devastating diseases. In both applications, combinations of features with time-series relevant features yielded the greatest impact than any other indicator considered in our analysis. We believe that our simple methodology, along with the interesting domain-specific findings that our work revealed, will motivate new studies across different scientific and industrial settings.