Prof. Xifeng Yan received the 2009 National Science Foundation Early Career Development (CAREER) award. CAREER awards, given to future academic leaders, are NSF’s most prestigious grants for young scholars. The award provides support for research in the amount of 495K dollars over a five-year period. Prof. Yan becomes the 18th NSF CAREER Award winner in our department.

Prof. Yan’s award is titled “Graph Information System: Deciphering Complex Networks.” Graphs and networks are ubiquitous, encoding complex relationships ranging from chemical bonds to social interactions. In order to analyze complex networks, users have to master sophisticated computing and programming skills. It indeed becomes a pain point for many scientists and engineers. The proposed graph information system is expected to change the state of the art and ease knowledge discovery in complex networks. Real-life networks are complex, not only having topological structures, but also containing nodes and edges associated with heterogeneous contents and attributes. The mixture of structures and contents raises two challenges that require new solutions for smarter and faster graph analysis. First, new types of graph search and mining operations, such as graph aggregation, graph association, and graph pattern mining, are emerging. Second, when graphs become complex and large, most of existing graph mining algorithms cannot scale well. Prof. Yan and his team will investigate these challenges and perform a comprehensive study of a general graph information system.