Duen Horng (Polo) Chau, Aniket Kittur, Jason Hong, and Christos Faloutsos

ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining

January 2011

We present APOLO, a system that uses a mixed-initiative approach to help people interactively explore and make sense of large network datasets. It combines visualization, rich user interaction and machine learning to engage the user in bottom-up sensemaking to gradually build up an understanding over time by starting small, rather than starting big and drilling down. APOLO helps users find relevant information by specifying exemplars, and then using a machine learning method called Belief Propagation to infer which other nodes may be of interest. We demonstrate APOLO's usage and benefits using a Google Scholar citation graph, consisting of 83,000 articles (nodes) and 150,000 citations relationships. A demo video of APOLO is available at http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dchau/apolo/apolo.mp4.