Networks are all around us. As such, network science is crucial for our understanding of many applications of high societal relevance (e.g., social and technological networks, epidemics, biological networks). Our research focuses on developing new machine learning methods to discover complex interactions and collective behaviors that determine how various types of events and behaviors in social networks are generated and propagated. In particular, we are interested in developing new approaches for social sensing that are relevant to the immediate concerns around pandemic detection and mitigation.
Selected Publications
Health Status Discovery for Online Bidirectional Contact Tracing and Disease Aware Navigation Conference
2025 IEEE Conference on Artificial Intelligence (CAI), 2025.
INDENT: Incremental Online Decision Tree Training for Domain-Specific Systems-on-Chip Proceedings Article
In: Proceedings of the 41st IEEE/ACM International Conference on Computer-Aided Design (ICCAD), pp. 1-9, 2022.
Quarantine in Motion: a Graph Learning Framework to Reduce Disease Transmission without Lockdown Proceedings Article
In: Proceedings of the 2022 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining (ASONAM 2022), 2022.
Pruning Digital Contact Networks for Meso-scale Epidemics Surveillance Using Foursquare Data Proceedings Article
In: ACM/IEEE Intl. Conf. on Advances in Social Network Analysis and Mining (ASONAM), 2021.
On network science and mutual information for explaining deep neural networks Proceedings Article
In: ICASSP 2020-2020 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP), pp. 8399–8403, IEEE 2020.
Centralized and decentralized isolation strategies and their impact on the COVID-19 pandemic dynamics Journal Article
In: arXiv preprint arXiv:2004.04222, 2020.
Epidemics
Viral outbreaks spread throughout networks of people via transmission events. We aim to combine human mobility data, network science, and machine learning to inform and mitigate the disease dynamics for COVID-19. Furthermore, we aim to build an always-on social sensing system to improve a population’s resilience to a novel virus.
Social Networks
Objective social media exhibit rich yet distinct temporal dynamics which cover a wide range of different scales. We are able to identify the compositional structures that can accurately characterize the complex social dynamics from these two social media. We further show that identifying these patterns can enable new applications such as anomaly detection and improved social dynamics forecasting. We aim to uncover new insights on understanding and engineering social media dynamics and their consequences on offline behaviors.
Biological Networks
It is well established that bacteria engage in social behavior and form networked communities via molecular signaling. We analyze the network dynamics and biofilm metrics, showing that our method can effectively reveal the underlying intercellular communication process and community organization within the biofilm. We claim that the application of social and network sciences to understanding bacteria population dynamics can aid in developing better drugs to control the many pathogenic bacteria that use social interactions to cause infections.