Facebook Funds Prof. Akoglu’s Graph Mining Research

 

Leman Akoglu, Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Stony Brook University, recently received a Facebook Faculty Gift for her research in the area of graph mining.

The gift, which totals $25K in unrestricted funds from Facebook, is given to a few select faculty members whose work and research are well-aligned with the Facebook’s research goals, and whose students also excel in research and their work in the classroom.

"I am very honored to receive this gift and thank Facebook for supporting outstanding novel research in the area of graph mining,” Professor Akoglu said. “I am very happy to see the relevance of our research for Facebook, a social media/tech giant, which validates the connection of our work to the real world. This gift will help us grow our research team and pursue our research directions at a deeper level."

Faculty members who receive the Facebook Faculty Gift from Facebook are chosen through an internal nomination process. The gift is designed to support research in the fields of machine learning, data mining and natural language processing.

“Because Dr. Akoglu’s research targets anomaly mining in complex environments, it has the potential to effectively reduce the attack surface area of modern communications, intelligence and computer systems,” Kaufman said. “Moreover, the research could have substantial impact on a wide range of real applications, such as insider threat, cybersecurity and systems monitoring.”

Dr. Akoglu, who joined the Stony Brook University faculty in August 2012, earned a PhD in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University. Her broader research interests include data mining, graph mining, machine learning and social media analysis. For more about her datalab, see this link. Akoglu is a 2014 NSF CAREER award recipient and she also received the Army Research Office Young Investigator Program Award in 2013. She has published over 40 peer reviewed articles and conference papers. A tenure-track professor, Akoglu is currently the Principal Investigator on over $2M worth of research grants.