Alum Bryan Perozzi ’16, now a research scientist at Google, won the Association of Computing Machinery SIGKDD, KDD 2017Doctoral Dissertation award for his work at Stony Brook University. The annual award acknowledges excellent doctoral research in the field of data mining and knowledge discovery.
Bryan Perozzi and Steven Skiena
Perozzi thesis, Local Modeling of Attributed Graphs: Algorithms and Applications, was recognized as the best dissertation of the year in the data science community. His work involves graph embeddings — ways of representing the knowledge encoded in the structure of networks to make them accessible for machine learning models.
Focused on developing scalable algorithms and models for attributed graphs, Perozzi presented an online learning algorithm utilizing recent advances in deep learning to result in rich graph embeddings. The applications of this research are far reaching for the fields of data mining, information retrieval, profiling and demographic inference, online advertising and fraud detection.
Perozzi, whose advisor was Stony Brook Professor Steven Skiena, defended his thesis in May 2016. Upon learning of the award, he said, “Wow, what an honor! I’m humbled to have my work recognized by this prestigious early career award, and I am looking forward to giving a talk during the Doctoral Dissertation Award session on August 15.” The KDD 2017 Conference takes place in Nova Scotia, August 13-17.
Professor Skiena is especially proud of Perozzi’s research accomplishments, and they are collaborators on a number of published works. Their paper on DeepWalk graph embeddings has already been cited 270 times in Google Scholar since its publication in 2014.
“Bryan was a very creative, hardworking and independent graduate student here at Stony Brook, and his work on DeepWalk has proven extremely influential in the data science and machine learning communities. They got the right man for this award,” said Skiena.
At Google, Perozzi’s research relates to the intersection of data mining, machine learning, graph theory, and network science with a particular focus on local graph algorithms. In January 2017, he published and presented Ties that Bind: Characterizing Classes by Attributes and Social Ties, a collaboration with Stony Brook PhD student Aria Rezaei and Carnegie Melon faculty Leman Akoglu.
Perozzi is the first PhD student in the Department of Computer Science, which is part of the College of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Stony Brook University, to receive this award.
About the Association for Computing Machinery
Founded in 1947, the ACM is the largest and oldest scientific and industrial computing society. SIGKDD is the ACM’s Special Interest Group on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining. SIGKDD selects one winner and two runner-ups each year to receive the award. Selections are based on the relevance to KDD, originality, scientific significance, technical depth and soundness, and overall presentation and readability.