Duen Horng (Polo) Chau

Alumni, http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dchau/

Duen Horng "Polo" Chau is a final year Ph.D. student in the Machine Learning Department at Carnegie Mellon University.

Polo's research bridges Data Mining and Human-Computer Interaction to synthesize systems and tools that help people understand and interact with Big Data. His thesis focuses on massive networks with billions of nodes and edges.

He blends techniques from machine learning (Belief Propagation), data mining (anomaly detection), visualization and user interaction. Notable projects:

• Apolo: mixed-initiative system (ML+vis) for making sense of large network data; Apolo helps users incrementally find relevant subgraphs to explore, avoids overwhelming the user
• Polonium: patent-pending malware detection technology (with Symantec); infers file reputation over 37 billion machine-file relationships
• NetProbe: auction fraud detection (eBay) that fingers bad guys by identifying their suspicous transactions; appeared in Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and more
• PEGASUS: award-winning project that creates graph algorithms for massive graph data

Polo is also an award-winning designer. His design of the Carnegie Mellon ID card has been in use since 2006.