5/13/2011 5:46:00 AM ITI Staff
Written by ITI Staff
ITI professor Jiawei Han has been recognized with a Bliss Professorship.
The Bliss bequest, which was established by Helen Eva Bliss in memory of her father Abel Bliss Jr., is used to advance scholarly activities in the University of Illinois College of Engineering. Named professorships are bestowed to recognize leaders who are among the most talented and accomplished on the faculty. Holders of college professorships are nominated by the dean upon recommendation of the College Advisory Committee on Endowed Appointments and approval of the Provost.
Han's groundbreaking and highly influential research has made him one of the top computer scientists in the world. With a focus on knowledge discovery and data mining, data warehousing, and database systems, he is recognized as a pioneer in the field. Han was the first to introduce a pattern-growth methodology for mining frequent, sequential, and structured patterns, as well as the first to develop a set of important algorithms for mining such patterns. These methodologies have been extremely influential in subsequent research and are widely used. Google Scholar lists Han as the second most cited author in the field of data mining; his FP growth algorithm alone has been cited more than 3,700 times. That algorithm or its variations have been introduced in most data mining textbooks and been used at a range of companies, including Google and Microsoft.
His most recent research in ITI has been a collaboration with Prof. Dan Roth on "Cyber Analytics: Analysis of Information Networks," funded by Boeing. Han's team has been focusing on cyber-physical network data analysis. Their latest developments include data mining methods that use MIT's Reality Mining data sets to discover social relationships (such as friends or co-workers) based on GPS data on different time periods when people meet. They have also recently developed methods for mining GeoFriend using GPA-based Cyber-Physical Social Networks, and designed the consolidated "MoveMine" system for discovery of periodic patterns for moving objects (such as animals).
Han is the director of the Informational Network Academic Research Center, which is funded by the Army Research Lab, and he is the leader or a senior member of research projects funded by NASA, NSF, MURI (AFOSR), DHS, and Boeing. He has graduated 23 Ph.D. students and currently advises 18 Ph.D. students. He has published 575 research publications, and his textbook, Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques, is used worldwide in undergraduate and graduate-level data mining courses. Computer Science is his home academic department. This spring, Han was honored with the College's Tau Beta Pi/Daniel C. Drucker Eminent Faculty Award.
by College of Engineering and ITI staff