News (2016)

News (2016)

IEEE BIBM 2016

On Thursday, December 15, 2016, Fan Jiang presented a refereed paper titled "Mining sequential patterns from uncertain big DNA data in the Spark framework", which he co-authored with his academic supervisor (Dr. Carson K. Leung), his fellow lab member (Oluwafemi A. Sarumi), and their collaborator (Dr. Christine Y. Zhang), in IEEE BIBM 2016 held in Shenzhen (深圳), China. BIBM has established itself as the premier research conference in bioinformatics and biomedicine.

IEEE HPCC 2016

    1. Dr. Carson K. Leung serves as a Program Chair for the 18th IEEE International Conference on High Performance Computing and Communications (HPCC 2016) held December 12-14, 2016 in Sydney, NSW, Australia. HPCC 2016 is collocated with

        • 14th IEEE International Conference on Smart City (SmartCity 2016), and

        • Second IEEE International Conference on Data Science (DSS 2016).

    2. Carson Leung, Dongsheng Li, Yang Xiang, Jack Dongarra, Albert Zomaya, Laurence Yang:

    3. Message from HPCC2016 Chairs.

    4. IEEE HPCC-SmartCity-DSS 2016:

    5. xviii.

      1. Message from HPCC2016 Chairs

      2. It is our great pleasure to welcome you to The Eighteenth IEEE International Conference on High Performance Computing and Communications (HPCC2016), Sydney, December 12-14, 2016. On behalf of the Organizing Committee, we would like to express our cordial welcome and utmost respect to all participants.

      3. With the rapid growth in computing and communications technology, the past decade has witnessed a proliferation of powerful parallel and distributed systems and an ever increasing demand for practice of high performance computing and communications (HPCC). HPCC has moved into the mainstream of computing and has become a key technology in determining future research and development activities in many academic and industrial branches, especially when the solution of large and complex problems must cope with very tight timing schedules.

      4. Among a series of highly successful International Conferences on High Performance Computing and Communications (HPCC), the HPCC 2016 conference is the 18th edition of a forum for engineers and scientists in academia, industry, and government to address the resulting profound challenges and to present and discuss their new ideas, research results, applications and experience on all aspects of high performance computing and communications. IEEE HPCC 2016 is sponsored by IEEE, IEEE Computer Society, and IEEE Technical Committee on Scalable Computing (TCSC).

      5. Each paper was peer reviewed by at least three program committee members. We wish to acknowledge the authors for choosing the conference as the forum to present their research. The final decisions have been made after a rigorous peer review process. We gratefully thank the Program Committee members and additional reviewers that contributed their valuable time and expertise to provide professional and quality reviews under a very tight schedule. We sincerely appreciate the constant support and pertinent advice from the General Chairs and the Steering Chairs, without which the conference could not have been organized in an effective and efficient manner. We are also deeply grateful to the Program Chairs, the Workshop Chairs, the Publicity Chairs, the International Advisory Committee, the Finance Chair, and the Local Chair, for their strong support and hard work, which are essential to the conference success. It is a great pleasure to work with such an excellent team. Last but not least, we would like to greatly thank the local organizing team.

      6. Finally, we expect the conference favours a useful interaction between researchers and practitioners, and provides a stimulating forum for exchanging and developing new ideas in the exciting and rapidly developing field of high performance computing and communications. We wish all of you enjoy the conference at the beautiful city of Sydney.

      7. Program Chairs

      8. Carson Leung, University of Manitoba, Canada

      9. Dongsheng Li, National University of Defense Technology, China

      10. Yang Xiang, Deakin University, Australia

      11. General Chairs

      12. Jack Dongarra, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, USA

      13. Albert Zomaya, The University of Sydney, Australia

      14. Laurence Yang, St. Francis Xavier University, Canada

IEEE SC2-2016

Dr. Carson K. Leung serves as an International Liaison & Publicity Chair for the Sixth IEEE International Symposium on Cloud and Service Computing (SC2-2016) held December 8-10, 2016 in Nadi, Fiji. IEEE SC2-2016 is collocated with 16th IEEE International Conference on Computer and Information Technology (CIT 2016).

IEEE/ACM DSAA 2016

Dr. Carson K. Leung serves as the Finance Chair for the Third IEEE/ACM International Conference on Data Science and Advanced Analytics (DSAA 2016) held October 17-19, 2016 in Montréal, QC, Canada.

EDB 2016

    1. Dr. Carson K. Leung serves as a Program Chair for the Sixth International Conference on Emerging Databases (EDB 2016) held October 17-19, 2016 in Jeju Island (濟州), South Korea. He is the editor of the Proceedings of EDB'16 Conference, which is published by the ACM Press.

    2. Jinho Kim, Young-Kuk Kim, James Geller: Message from EDB 2016 General Chairs. EDB 2016: v

      1. Many people contributed to make EDB 2016 a great success. Our thanks go to all of them: Honorary Chairs, Sun-Hwa Hahn, Young-Duk Lee, and Bong-Hee Hong; Organizing Chairs, Wookey Lee, Xiaoyong Du, and Atsuyuki Morishima; Program Chairs, Young-Ho Park, Wonik Choi, and Carson Leung; Publicity Chairs, Sang-Wook Kim, Sanghyun Park, Jae-Soo Yoo, and Mukesh Mohania; Publication Chairs, Yang-Sae Moon, Woong-Ki Loh, Sael Lee, and Robert Wrembel; Workshop Chairs, Min Song, Jun-Ki Min, and Wendy Hui Wang; DBSW Chairs, Jae-Gil Lee, U Kang, and Aoying Zhou; Tutorial Chairs, Jae-Woo Kang, Sung-Won Jung, and Yasushi Sakurai; Finance Chairs, Duk-Hwan Kim, Ha-Joo Song, Yong-Tae Woo, and Chaokun Wang; Registration Chairs, Young-Koo Lee, Jinseok Chae, and Alfredo Cuzzocrea; Local Arrangement Chairs, Han-Joon Kim, Aziz Nasridinov, and Beom Jong You; Web Chairs, Chul-Yeon Kim and Nidhi Arora. Our thanks also go to the KIISE (Korea Institute of Information Scientists and Engineers) Database Society of Korea, which has organized EDB 2016.

      2. Jinho Kim, Kangwon National University, South Korea

      3. Young-Kuk Kim, Chungnam National University, South Korea

      4. James Geller,New Jersey Institute of Technology, USA

    3. Wonik Choi, Carson K. Leung, Young-Ho Park: Message from EDB 2016 Program Chairs. EDB 2016: vi

      1. Message from EDB 2016 Program Chairs

      2. The International Conference on Emerging Databases (EDB) is an annual forum for exploring technologies, applications, and theory of emerging database fields. It encourages academic and industrial interaction and promotes collaborative research in emerging databases by bringing together academics, government and industry professionals to discuss recent progress and challenges in technologies, applications, and theory of the fields. Moreover, EDB also serves as a platform for theoreticians and practitioners to exchange their original research ideas on academic or industrial aspects, present their new findings or innovative results on theoretical or practical aspects, share their experiences on integrating new technologies into products and applications, discuss their work on performing novel applications in real-life situations, describe their development and operations of challenging database related systems, and identify unsolved challenges.

      3. The Sixth International Conference on Emerging Databases: Technologies, Applications, and Theory (EDB 2016) focuses on data science, data mining, big data management and analytics, which are popular areas in computer science and other related fields. The conference provides opportunities for researchers and practitioners to exchange current issues, challenges, new technologies, and practical experiences. EDB 2016 is held at Jeju KAL Hotel in Jeju Island, South Korea, on October 17-19, 2016, and is hosted by KIISE (Korean Institute of Information Scientists and Engineers) Database Society of Korea. For EDB 2016, we have recruited many international experts in emerging database and data science to join our team of international program committee. As a result, our Program Committee consists of professionals from different parts of the world including Australia, Belgium, Canada, Chile, China, France, Hong Kong, India, Italy, Japan, Qatar, Singapore, South Korea, Switzerland, Taiwan, Thailand, USA, and Vietnam. This committee has done an excellent job in completing the single-blind review and on-line double-blind debate processes. The paper selection process was thorough and competitive. Each submission was refereed by at least two reviewers. Among these submissions, we accepted 7 high-quality submissions of 8-10 pages each as full research papers (i.e., an acceptance rate of around 13%) addressing technical issues, solutions, and technologies in emerging database and data science fields. To allow more researchers to express their opinions and vision on exploring new concepts and research directions, we also include 12 additional research papers and several posters. This year, we have a rich program—which includes keynote speeches, invited talks, research paper presentations, tutorials, and poster sessions—spanning over three days (October 17-19, 2016).

      4. EDB 2016 would not have been possible without the help and effort of many people and organizations. We thank our host (KIISE Database Society of Korea) and sponsors (2e Consulting, Korea Database Agency, and Nara System), and many other organizations, for their support of this conference. We also express our thanks to EDB 2016 Organizing Committee members, especially the Honorary Chairs (S.-H. Hahn, B.-H. Hong, and Y.-D. Lee), General Chairs (J. Geller, J. Kim, and Y.-K. Kim), and Organizing Chairs (X. Du, W. Lee, and A. Morishima) for their valuable advice and suggestions towards the conference. We are grateful to EDB 2016 Program Committee members for their professionalism and dedication in the process of judging the contributions of papers and producing constructive comments to the authors. We also thank authors and non-author participants of this conference. Last but not least, we thank the ACM staff (especially, C. Rodkin and A. Lacson) for their help in publishing the current proceedings in the ACM International Conference Proceeding Series (ICPS) by ACM Press.

      5. Wonik Choi, Inha University, South Korea

      6. Carson K. Leung, University of Manitoba, Canada

      7. Young-Ho Park, Sookmyung Women's University, South Korea

CPE 28(15) (October 2016)

Ladjel Bellatreche, Mukesh Mohania:

Big data analytics and knowledge discovery.

Concurrency and Computation: Practice & Experience (CPE) 28(15),

special issue on DaWaK 2014:

3945-3947 (October 2016)

The DaWaK 2014 call for papers attracted 109 papers, and the program committee finally selected 34 full papers and 8 short papers, making an acceptance rate of 31%.

Out of the 34 full papers, we selected seven papers to be invited for the special issue in the Journal Concurrency and Computation: Practice and Experience, Wiley. After a second round of reviews, we finally accepted four papers. Thus, the relative acceptance rate for the papers included in this special issue is competitive.

We congratulate the authors of these four papers and thank all authors who submitted articles to DaWaK 2014. It should be noticed that three of these papers used case studies issued from international projects funded either by European Commission or Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada and University of Manitoba.

The third paper titled, Parallel social network mining for interesting following patterns, by Carson Leung, Fan Jiang, Adam Pazdor, and Aaron Peddle [3], proposes a data structure called FoP-structure to capture the directional following actions among social entities. Two data mining algorithms are also presented. The first algorithm, called FoP-miner, makes use of the proposed data structure to serially compute interesting following patterns. The second algorithm, called ParFoP-miner, speeds up the data mining process by concurrently computing interesting following patterns in parallel. Analytical and experimental evaluation that demonstrates the efficiency of the proposed data structure and mining algorithms in terms of space consumption and runtime are conducted. FoP-miner and ParFoP-miner are compared against the most important existing algorithms FP-growth, TD-FP-Growth, H-mine, VIPER, etc. using IBM synthetic datasets and real-life retail datasets. This project is partially supported by Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada and University of Manitoba.

REFERENCES

3. Leung C, Jiang F, Pazdor AGM, Peddle AM. Parallel social network mining for interesting following patterns. Concurrency and Computation: Practice and Experience 2016; 28(15):3994-4012.

LADJEL BELLATRECHE

LIAS/ISAE-ENSMA, Poitiers University, Futuroscope,

Poitiers, France

E-mail: bellatreche@ensma.fr

MUKESH MOHANIA

IBM Research, Carlton, Australia

ECML-PKDD 2016

On Tuesday, September 20, 2016, Adam G.M. Pazdor presented a refereed paper titled "Data mining meets HCI: data and visual analytics of frequent patterns", which he co-authored with his academic supervisor (Dr. Carson K. Leung) and his fellow lab members (Christopher L. Carmichael, Yaroslav Hayduk, Fan Jiang, and Vadim V. Kononov), in ECML-PKDD 2016 held in Riva del Garda, Italy. ECML-PKDD is the premier European machine learning and data mining conference and builds upon a very successful series of 26 ECML and 19 PKDD conferences, which have been jointly organized for the past 15 years.

Jian Pei's Visit

Dr. Jian Pei (裴健)—who is a Canada Research Chair in Big Data Science and a Professor in Department of Computing Science at Simon Fraser University, as well as an ACM Fellow and an IEEE Fellow—visited our lab during September 15-16, 2016. On Friday, September 16, 2016, he gave a presentation on his research work on "Bringing data to life - building data science tools and platforms for business applications" in the inaugural Faculty of Science Interdisciplinary Speaker Series on the theme of Big data revolution. Dr. Carson K. Leung is the MC of this presentation.

Kazutoshi Sumiya's Visit

Dr. Kazutoshi Sumiya (角谷 和俊, a Full Professor from Kwansei Gakuin University, Japan), who is also a director of the Information Processing Society of Japan (IPSJ), visited our lab during September 12-13, 2016. On Monday, September 12, 2016, he presented his research work on "Less-conscious information retrieval techniques for location based services" in a UofM CS seminar hosted by Dr. Carson K. Leung.

Charles Ling's Visit

On Thursday, September 01, 2016, Dr. Charles X. Ling (凌晓峰)—who is a Science Distinguished Research Professor in Computer Science Department at Western University, the CEO & Founder of GlucoGuide, and a Fellow of the Canadian Academy of Engineering (CAE)—presented his research work on "Mining lifestyle data for diabetes" in a UofM CS seminar hosted by Dr. Carson K. Leung.

IEEE BigDataSE 2016

    1. Dr. Carson K. Leung serves as a Program Chair for the 10th IEEE International Conference on Big Data Science and Engineering (BigDataSE 2016) held August 23-26, 2016 in Tianjin (天津), China. IEEE BigDataSE 2016 is collocated with

      • 15th IEEE International Conference on Trust, Security and Privacy in Computing and Communications (TrustCom 2016); and

      • 14th IEEE International Symposium on Parallel and Distributed Processing with Applications (ISPA 2016).

    2. Xueqi Cheng, Yi Pan, Carson Leung:

    3. Message from the IEEE BigDataSE 2016 Program Chairs.

    4. IEEE TrustCom-BigDataSE-ISPA 2016:

    5. xxxv.

      1. Message from the IEEE BigDataSE 2016 Program Chairs

      2. On behalf of the Program Committee of the 10th IEEE International Conference on Big Data Science and Engineering (BigDataSE 2016), we would like to welcome you to join the conference in Tianjin, China.

      3. BigDataSE 2016 is the next event in a series of highly successful International Conferences, previously held as BigDataSE 2015 (Helsinki, Finland, 20–22 August, 2015), BigDataSE 2014 (Beijing, China, September 2014), BigDataSE 2013 (Sydney, Australia, December 2013), BigDataMR 2012 (Xiangtan, China, November 2012), AHPCN-12 (Bradford, UK, June 2012), AHPCN-11 (Banff, Canada, September 2011), AHPCN-10 (Melbourne, Australia, September 2010), AHPCN-09 (Seoul, Korea, June 2009), and AHPCN-08 (Dalian, China, September 2008). BigDataSE 2016 received 36 submissions from 21 countries and regions. All submissions were rigorously reviewed. Based on the review results, 9 papers were selected for oral presentation at the conference, giving an acceptance rate of 25%.

      4. We would like to offer our gratitude to the Steering Committee Chairs Jinjun Chen and Laurence T. Yang, the General Chairs, Geoffrey Fox, Minyi Guo, and Raghu Ganti, and the Program Vice Chair, Shuai Ma, for their excellent support and invaluable suggestions that contributed to the success of the final program. In particular, we would like to thank all the researchers and practitioners who submitted their manuscripts, and thank the Program Committee members and the additional reviewers for their tremendous efforts and timely reviews.

      5. We sincerely hope that the conference will provide a great opportunity for you to share your brilliant ideas with each other. Enjoy the conference, both technically and socially.

      6. Xueqi Cheng, Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, China

      7. Yi Pan, Georgia State University, USA

      8. Carson Leung, University of Manitoba, Canada

      9. Program Chairs of BigDataSE 2016

IEEE/ACM ASONAM-FAB 2016 Best Paper Award

Dr. Carson Leung was recognized by the organizers of IEEE/ACM ASONAM 2016, FOSINT-SI 2016, HI-BI-BI 2016, and FAB 2016 for the Best Paper titled "Mining 'Following' Patterns from Big Sparse Social Networks" presented at FAB 2016.

IEEE CyberSciTech 2016

Dr. Carson K. Leung serves as the Tutorial/Panel Chair for the 2016 IEEE Cyber Science and Technology Congress (CyberSciTech 2016) held August 08-10, 2016 in Auckland, New Zealand. IEEE CyberSciTech 2016 is collocated with:

    • 14th IEEE International Conference on Dependable, Autonomic and Secure Computing (DASC 2016);

    • 14th IEEE International Conference on Pervasive Intelligence and Computing (PICom 2016); and

    • Second IEEE International Conference on Big Data Intelligence and Computing (DataCom 2016).

Department Seminar - Summer 2016

On Thursday, August 4, 2016, Caitlin Martins gave a presentation on her (Honours) project on "External factors on e-sport performance prediction".

Information Sciences 354 (August 2016)

Akiz Uddin Ahmed, Chowdhury Farhan Ahmed, Md. Samiullah, Nahim Adnan, Carson Kai-Sang Leung:

Mining interesting patterns from uncertain databases.

Information Sciences 354:

60-85 (August 2016)

Highlights

    • We proposed a strategy for weighted uncertain interesting pattern mining.

    • It computes expected support confidence to mine weighted correlated patterns.

    • It prunes infrequent patterns early by computing prefix proxy values.

    • It constructs a tree to capture prefix cap & proxy values for uncertain databases.

    • Our strategy generates a manageable number of interesting patterns quickly.

IEEE CBDCom 2016

    1. Dr. Carson K. Leung serves as a General Chair for the Second IEEE International Conference on Cloud and Big Data Computing (CBDCom 2016) held on July 18-21, 2016 in Toulouse, France. IEEE CBDCom 2016 was collocated with

      • 13th IEEE International Conference on Ubiquitous Intelligence and Computing (UIC 2016),

      • 13th IEEE International Conference on Advanced and Trusted Computing (ATC 2016),

      • 16th IEEE International Conference on Scalable Computing and Communications (ScalCom 2016),

      • Second IEEE International Conference on Internet of People (IoP 2016), and

      • 2016 IEEE Smart World Congress (SmartWorld 2016).

    2. Didier El Baz, Julien Bourgeois, Christophe Cérin, Carson K. Leung:

    3. Message from the CBDCom 2016 General Chairs.

    4. IEEE UIC-ATC-ScalCom-CBDCom-IoP-SmartWorld 2016:

    5. xli-xlii

      1. Message from the CBDCom 2016 General Chairs

      2. Welcome to the IEEE International Conference on Cloud and Big Data Computing (CBDCom 2016) sponsored by IEEE, IEEE Computer Society and IEEE Technical Committee of Scalable Computing (TCSC). This year, the conference is organized by the LAAS-CNRS, University of Toulouse, France. It is our great pleasure to hold CBDCom in Toulouse, July 18-21, 2016. On behalf of the Organizing Committee of CBDCom 2016, we would like to express to all participants our cordial welcome.

      3. The IEEE International Conference CBDCom was established in 2015. This is a premier forum for researchers, practitioners, developers and users who are interested in cloud and big data computing to explore new ideas, techniques and tools, as well as to exchange experience on cloud and big data computing. The conference covers academic research, industrial applications, as well as demonstration of research and applications. In addition to the latest research achievements, the conference also covers new commercial data management systems, innovative commercial applications of cloud computing and big data technology, as well as experience in applying recent research advances to real-world problems. The goals of the conference include the following: new advances, directions and experiences in approaches, algorithms and applications to storage, management and analysis of big data; virtualization, networking, scheduling and quality of service (QoS), as well as issues and challenges for cloud computing; implementations on different computing platforms for cloud and big data systems, and experiences on solving real-world problems.

      4. The program consists of several regular and short research papers, as well as two workshops. Moreover, the conference covers the following broad scope of topics: Big data algorithms, applications and services; big data mining and analytics; big data processing and querying; cloud and big data for Internet of things (IoT); government and industrial experiences for cloud and big data; green computing and networking technologies for cloud and big data; software engineering for cloud computing and big data; cloud computing solutions and platforms; privacy and security for cloud and big data; big data visualization and big data education.

      5. This year, the conference is held in conjunction with five IEEE associated conferences: the 13th International Conferences on Ubiquitous Intelligence and Computing (UIC 2016), the 13th International Conference on Advanced and Trusted Computing (ATC 2016), the 16th International Conference on Scalable Computing and Communications (ScalCom 2016), the International Conference on Internet of People (IoP 2016) and the Smart World Congress (SmartWorld 2016).

      6. For the successful organization of an international conference of this size and diversity, we count on the great support of many people and organizations. We would like to thank the Steering Committee Chairs Jianhua Ma and Laurence T. Yang, for their constant help and guidance.

      7. We also thank the Honorary Chair Mazin Yousif.

      8. We thank the Program Chairs Ladjel Bellatreche, Yinglong Xia, and Weishan Zhang for inviting an effective team of Topic Chairs: Boualem Benatallah, Nan Cao, Kalyana Chadalavada, Dickson K.W. Chiu, Alfredo Cuzzocrea, Mayank Daga, Manisha Gajbe, Carlos García-Alvarado, Sanjay Madria, Yassine Ouhammou, Praveen Rao, Toyotaro Suzumura, Jian Tang, Annie T.T. Ying, Wenhua Yu, and Nuyun Zhang and Program Committee members, selecting high-quality papers after a rigorous review process and preparing an excellent conference program.

      9. Thanks to the Workshops Chair Wookey Lee for coordinating with organizers of the two related workshops: the Fifth Graph Data Base Workshop (GDB) organized by Jinho Kim and the Workshop on High Performance Big Data Computing (WHPBDC) 2016 organized by Tarek Menouer.

      10. Thanks also to the Special Issues Chair Mianxiong Dong for coordinating with publishers regarding special issues on extensions of selected CBDCom papers.

      11. Moreover, we thank the Publicity Chairs Samia Bouzefrane and Elio Masciari for publicizing the conference.

      12. We also thank the Local Organization Committee Pascal Berthou, Ascension De Sousa, Moussa Elkihel, Bilal Fakih, Isabelle Lefebvre, Caroline Male, Imen Megdiche, Bastien Plazolles, Jia Luo, and Li Zhu led by Chair Didier El Baz for their selflessly volunteered hours in organizing the practical details of the conferences.

      13. Furthermore, thanks to the Advisory Committee members Zhikui Chen and Mohammad S. Obaidat for their helpful advice for this conference. Thank also to the editor Lisa O'Conner and manager Patrick Kellenberger from Conference Publishing Services (CPS) of IEEE Computer Society for producing the conference proceedings.

      14. Finally, we acknowledge gratefully the support of NVIDIA for sponsoring many social events of CBDCom 2016 and organizing the innovative Tutorial on Deep Learning.

      15. Last but not least, we would like to thank the authors for choosing IEEE CBDCom 2016 as a venue for presenting their scientific research works, exchanging their novel ideas, and sharing their practical experience on cloud and big data computing. We would also like to thank the researchers, practitioners, developers, and users who are interested in cloud and big data computing for choosing this conference as a forum for exploring new ideas, techniques, and tools on cloud and big data computing in academia, government, and industry. We hope you will find the conference stimulating and constructive and at the same time enjoy the beautiful and dynamic city of Toulouse and South West France.

      16. The GENERAL CHAIRS and Co-CHAIRS of CBDCom 2016

    1. Yinglong Xia, Ladjel Bellatreche, Weishan Zhang:

    2. Message from CBDCom 2016 Program Chairs.

    3. IEEE UIC-ATC-ScalCom-CBDCom-IoP-SmartWorld 2016:

    4. xliii.

      1. All of us involved in the review process would also like to thank the General Chairs: Didier EL BAZ, LAAS-CNRS University of Toulouse, France, Julien BOURGEOIS, FEMTO-ST France, Christophe CERIN, University of Paris XIII, France, the General Co-Chair Carson LEUNG, University of Manitoba Canada, Wookey LEE, Inha University South Korea, the Publicity Chair: Samia BOUZEFRANE, CNAM France, Elio MASCARA, ICAR-CNR Italy, the Special Issues Chair Mianxiong DONG, Muroran Institute of Technology Japan, for their selflessly volunteered hours in coordinating, organizing, and managing the conference’s publicity, paper submission, and other activities.

    5. The PROGRAM CHAIRS of CBDCom 2016

    6. Yinglong Xia, Huawei Research American, USA

    7. Ladjel Bellatreche, ISAE-ENSMA, France

    8. Weishan Zhang, China University of Petroleum Qingdao, China

EIDWT 2016

Dr. Carson K. Leung serves as a Track Chair for the Fifth EIDWT Conference (May 11-13, 2016 in Kazan/Каза́нь, Russia). He oversees the Data Analytics for Learning and Virtual Organisations track. The conference proceedings are published by the IEEE Computer Society Press.

2015/16 Science Award for Excellence in TA

    1. Each year, teaching assistants (TAs) in the Faculty of Science are recognized for the excellence of their work. This year,

        • Fan Jiang is (once again) selected as a winner of, and

        • Adam Pazdor is nominated for,

    2. the 2015/16 Faculty of Science Award for Excellence in Teaching Assistance in recognition of their efforts and work as TAs in the Fall 2015 offering of COMP 4710 taught by Dr. Carson Leung. Among all 30 nominees for this award, Jiang and Pazdor are the only two from Computer Science. Previous winners include Fan Jiang and Richard MacKinnon (2014/15 for the Fall 2014 offering of COMP 3380).

    3. Department of Computer Science, University of Manitoba: News

      1. Congratulations Terry!

      2. May 12, 2016

      3. Congratulations to Terry (Fan) Jiang, who is one of the recipients of this year's Faculty of Science Awards for Excellence in Teaching Assistance.

Co-op Success 2016

Aaron Peddle, a lab member, was profiled by UofM CS Co-op Office in Celebrating Rockstars - Co-op Success Summer 2016:

"With his strong academic background, Aaron had fantastic opportunities in CS even prior to his acceptance in to the Co-op program. He received a research award to spend a summer working with Dr. Carson Leung where he was exposed to big data and data mining research.

The lab experience was complimented by the vast number of personal projects that Aaron had been pursuing on his own - by the time he was accepted in to Co-op, his application package was impressive and we all knew that Aaron was well positioned for success. He expressed interest in going out of town for his first work term and ended up receiving two offers through that process – one in Vancouver and one in Ottawa. This news came during the same week that he was having a second interview with Facebook! Not a bad problem to have as a Work Term 1 student, to be honest, this level of success (so early on) was unheard of in our program.

After taking a huge risk, and having to make some tough decisions, Aaron accepted a position with CCIRC in Ottawa for his first work term. It was there that he gained further exposure to big data and data mining, working with tools like Hadoop. This type of work wasn’t actually part of Aaron’s Co-op job description, but being the keen and passionate learner that he is, he asked to tackle new and out of scope projects that would give him the exposure that he wanted.

Fast forwarding to his second work term, Aaron’s goal was to get to Silicon Valley where he could start making some important connections, which is exactly what he did. After several grueling technical interviews and some challenging take home assignments, he was on his way. With the confidence, and now experience behind him, Aaron was able to leverage the relationships that he had with his colleagues (as well as their network) in order to open even more doors. Aaron will be joining Cloudera, in San Francisco, this summer for his third and final work term and we can’t wait to see how things will unfold from there."

Science Bash 2016

On Wednesday, May 4, 2016, Dr. Carson Leung presented in the Second Annual Science Bash featuring an image and a 2-minute talk about himself and his research in the UofM CS Database & Data Mining Lab.

USRA 2016

Two lab members won undergraduate student research awards:

    • Second-year undergraduate student Mr. Murun Enkhee, who is enrolled in the B.C.Sc.(Hons.) degree program, won a UofM Vice-President (Research and International) Undergraduate Research Award (URA) to conduct a full-time 16-week research project on "Exploration of data science solutions for big data mining and analytics" in the area of data mining under the academic supervision of Dr. Carson K. Leung. Among ~25,000 undergraduate students across the campus, he was one of 100 winners of this award.

    • Third-year undergraduate student Ms. Kimberly Tran, who is enrolled in the B.Sc.(Hons.) in CS-Stat degree program, won an NSERC Undergraduate Student Research Award (USRA) to conduct a full-time 16-week research project on "Big data analytics and mining" in the area of data mining under the academic supervision of Dr. Carson K. Leung. She was one of the winners in Department of Computer Science.

BIDMA 2016

    1. On Tuesday, April 26, 2016, Fan Jiang presented a refereed paper titled "Big data analytics of social network data", which he co-authored with his academic supervisor (Dr. Carson K. Leung), in BIDMA 2016 held in Calgary, AB, Canada.

    2. Carson K. Leung, Fan Jiang, Tik Wai Poon, Paul-Émile Crevier:

    3. Big data analytics of social network data: Who cares most about you on Facebook?

    4. Highlighting the Importance of Big Data Management and Analysis for Various Applications (Studies in Big Data (SBD) 27):

    5. 1-15 (2018) [BIDMA16]

      1. Abstract

      2. In recent years, many people are connected with each other via social networking sites such as Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Weibo. Many users on these social networking sites actively add posts or tweets so that they share their activities with their friends or connections. This leads to big social network data. For many of these creators of social network data (i.e., users on the social networking sites), it is not unusual for them to have hundreds or even thousands of friends or connections. Among these friends or connections, some of them care about the users by responding to the users’ posts or tweets (e.g., like these posts, add comments to the posts, or retweet the tweets) while some other are lurkers who just observe do not actively participate in any social network activities. How to distinguish those who care about you from those lurkers? To answer this question, we present in this book chapter big data management and analytics techniques on social network data. Specifically, our techniques help users discover friends or connections who cares most about them on social networking sites such as Facebook.

BigDAS 2016

Dr. Carson K. Leung serves as a Program Chair for the Second International Conference on Big Data Applications and Services (BigDAS 2016) held on January 22-27, 2016 in Phnom Penh, Cambodia.

Jiang's and Pazodr's Teaching

    1. Fan Terry Jiang, a PhD candidate in our lab, teaches:

      • COMP 1270 A02 (Introductory Computer Usage 2) in Winter 2016 on every Monday, Wednesday & Friday at 10:30am-11:20am in Buller 306 from January 06 to April 08, 2016;

      • COMP 4380 (Database Implementation) also in Winter 2016 on every Tuesday and Thursday 2:30pm-3:45pm in E2-330 EITC from January 07 to April 07, 2016.

  1. By the end of Winter 2016, Jiang has taught a total of six sections of four distinct courses (distance & online education-based COMP 1010 twice, lecture-based COMP 1270 twice, as well as lecture-based COMP 2150 and 4380 once each).

    1. Adam G. Pazdor, a graduate student in our lab, teaches:

      • COMP 1012 (Computer Programming for Scientists and Engineers) in Summer 2016 on every Monday and Wednesday at 7pm-8:20pm in E2-320 EITC from May 02 to August 03, 2016;

      • COMP 3380 A02 (Databases: Concepts and Usage) in Fall 2016 on every Tuesday and Thursday at 8:30am-9:45am in E2-350 EITC from September 08 to December 08, 2016, whereas A01 is taught by Dr. Leung.