my blog
Polo Chau | Full name: Duen Horng Chau | Other name: Edwin Chau
Research

I am a PhD student in the Machine Learning Department in the School of Computer Science of Carnegie Mellon University. I have been doing research in data mining and Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) simultaneously.. Previously, I was a research associate at the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at my university; I graduated from the institute's HCI Masters program in 2005.

My main research interest is in detecting suspicious patterns in graphs. Graphs are powerful tools for capturing important connections among entities. They enable us to discover pattern that are otherwise hard to detect by simply analyzing the entities in isolation. Graphs have been used in many domains.

My advisor is Prof. Christos Faloutsos of the CS department. We work together on the data mining project "Fraud detection in online auctions" that I proposed. Our goal is to uncover fraud in online auctions using data mining techniques to analyze publicly available transactions on auction sites and identify suspicious associations among users. This project was covered in The Wall Street Journal, The Associated Press, as well as TV and radio news media.

I gained much of my HCI research experience through working on a range of projects with my previous supervisor Prof Brad Myers and his Ph.D. students: Andy Ko, Jeff Nichols, and Jacob Wobbrock, who is now a professor at the University of Washington. Some of the projects I have worked on:

Most recently, I created Feldspar (demo video), the first system that supports associative retrieval of personal information. Through these and other projects, I learned to ask the right research questions, and I answered them in over 400 sessions of user studies and data analysis.

My long-term research goal is to combine machine learning and HCI to create visual and interactive graph mining systems for information analysts. Such systems can help analysts identify anomalous patterns, specify them, and instruct a system to detect them – this helps us stay ahead of threats, which are emerging much faster these days. Towards this goal, I started the TeraGraph project with Christos and Prof. Jason Hong at HCII. We will integrate visualization and HCI’s user-oriented approach to help users understand what machine learning algorithms try to achieve, what features they learn on, and how to make sense of the detected patterns.

I'm also a designer. See my work below. :-)

Publications
In the News
Awards and Honors
Invited Talks
Services
Design Portfolio
Free Stuff
I created these icons for work. You can download and use them for free. A small notice of credits would be nice! :-)
Zip file of icons in 48x48 PNG format
Zip file of icons in 16x16 PNG format

mouse down icon mouse up icon mouse drag icon mouse move icon
mouse scroll up icon mouse scroll down icon
keyboard key down icon keyboard key up icon
repaint screen icon
Great Stuff

Track money with Buxfer, a site developed by my friend Shashank Pandit and two of his friends at CMU to ease tracking of informal debts between friends. track Expenses track shared bill track money manage apartment rent utilities shared dinner restaurant spreadsheet balance sheet


Most graphics on this page were made with Xara Extreme — the world's fastest, most affordable and the best vector graphics program, in my opinion :)


A FREE CVS clients for Windows, fully integrated into Windows Explorer. *Very* easy to use.


Just like Tortoise CVS, this FREE SVN clients for Windows is fully integrated into Windows Explorer. *Very* easy to use.


If you want need to work on LaTeX documents, I highly recommend you use MikTeX and TeXnicCenter. They're all you need for editing and building your document into PS or PDF. This site has some very nice instructions on how to install the two programs (simple steps).

Contact