Ben Markines

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My primary research interests are in Web search and data mining, social Web applications, social networks, visualization and mobile devices. Other interests include computer vision, high performance computing, and anything startup-y.

schiacci (at) icloud (dot) com

Address:
415 E Middlefield Rd
Mountain View, CA

CV
Research Statement

A barely more formal bio:
I am currently an architect at Mobileiron and lead the data projects.

I was the Chief Scientist and a founding team member at an early stage startup Syfto.com. We worked with advanced techniques for ontology generation, recommendation, and categorization. Prior to Syfto, I was the Chief Technology Officer at ListenLogic. We mine social media to infer demographics and psychographics. ListenLogic is the main social listening platform for pharma.

I received my Ph.D. in May 2009 from the Department of Computer Science at Indiana University Bloomington. My research interests are in Web 2.0, tagging systems, Web mining and network analysis. My dissertation discusses the discovery of relationships among tags and resources mined from collaborative tagging systems. These relationships in turn lead to improved recommendation, navigation, and spam detection on the World Wide Web. Before pursuing my Ph.D., I worked as an IBM software engineer developing various applications. Additionally, I was a staff researcher at ISI Foundation in Turin, Italy. I received my B.S. and M.S. from the Department of Computer Science at Northern Illinois University.

Publications

L. Aiello, A. Barrat, R. Schifanella, C. Cattuto, B. Markines, F. Menczer. Friendship prediction and homophily in social media. ACM Transactions on the Web (TWEB)

R. Schifanella, A. Barrat, C. Cattuto, B. Markines, F. Menczer. Folks in folksonomies: Social link prediction from shared metadata. Proc. of WSDM 2010

B. Markines, C. Cattuto, F. Menczer, D. Benz, A. Hotho, G. Stumme. Evaluating Similarity Measures for Emergent Semantics of Social Tagging. Proc. WWW 2009 [slides] [presentation]

B. Markines, C. Cattuto, F. Menczer. Social Spam Detection. Proc. AIRWEB 2009 [Web site]

B. Markines with Jessica Rubart. Socially induced semantic networks and applications. SIGWEB Newsletter, Autumn (Sep. 2009)

B. Markines. Socially Induced Semantic Networks and Applications. Indiana University Computer Science Technical Report TR676. July, 2008. (thesis)

F. Radicchi, S. Fortunato, B. Markines and A. Vespignani. Diffusion of scientific credits and the ranking of scientists. Physical Review E (2009) [Web site]

H. Roinestad, J. Burgoon, B. Markines, F. Menczer. Incentives for Social Annotation. Proc. of SIGIR 2009 Demonstrations

B. Markines, F. Menczer. A Scalable, Collaborative Similarity Measure for Social Annotation Systems. Poster Proc. HT 2009

H. Roinestad, J. Burgoon, B. Markines, F. Menczer. Incentives for Social Annotation. Poster Proc. HT 2009

B. Markines, H. Roinestad, F. Menczer. Efficient Assembly of Social Semantic Networks. Proc. HT 2008 (nominated for best paper award)

J. Donaldson, M. Conover, B. Markines, H. Roinestad, F. Menczer. Visualizing Social Links in Exploratory Search. Proc. HT 2008

W. Huang, K. Borner, B. Herr, and B. Markines. Cyberinfrastructure Shell (CIShell): An OSGi-Based Framework for the Integration of Datasets and Algorithms. EclipseCON 2007, Santa Clara, California

B. Markines, L. Stoilova, and F. Menczer. GiveALink: A Social Recommendation System. Proc. NetSci Conference 2006, Bloomington, Indiana

B. Markines, L. Stoilova, F. Menczer. Bookmark Hierarchies and Collaborative Recommendation. Final version in Proc. AAAI 2006

B. Markines, L. Stoilova, F. Menczer. Implicit Tagging using Donated Bookmarks. Proc. WWW2006 Workshop on Collaborative Web Tagging, 2006

L. Stoilova, T. Holloway, B. Markines, A. Maguitman, F. Menczer. GiveALink: Mining a Semantic Network of Bookmarks for Web Search and Recommendation. Proc. KDD Workshop on Link Discovery: Issues, Approaches and Applications (LinkKDD-2005)

Research

My thesis advisor Fil Menczer is also the leader of the NaN group. Thank you for all your help Fil! My pet project is:

Help us out and donate/import your bookmarks?

We had a paper accepted to AIRWEB 2009 titled "Social Spam Detection" with some very promising results. Check it out!

So I was funded by a generous NSF grant through Fil. He might deny it, but I swear I helped him get it :).