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Academic lecture from Prof. Jie Wang

Title: Discovering New Knowledge from the Internet
Presenter: Prof. Jie Wang, Department of Computer Science, University of Massachusetts, Lowell
Time: 10:00AM June 4, 2010
Location: Room 504, MMW Building

A large number of natural phenomena, whose laws of governance are yet to be discovered, have in recent years been found to fit nicely with the double Pareto lognormal (DPLN) distribution. These phenomena include, among other things, the size of human settlements, the size of particles, the size of oil fields, the size of world-wide-web files, and the spread and extinguishment of forest wild fires. The DPLN distribution was derived from studying the ups and downs of financial portfolios over a population of investors in the stock market. In this talk we will first try to explain why double Pareto lognormal would make sense for a number of natural phenomena. We will then show that certain aspects of human knowledge obtained from the Internet, for instance, the conceptual linkage in the biology network, also fit nicely with double Pareto lognormal. We hope that this study will help us obtain insights on the underlying knowledge structure for modeling knowledge generations. Such understanding will in turn help us obtain insights on how human acquire knowledge, which would finally lead us toward an automation of knowledge discovery from the largest storage of knowledge forest that resides in the Internet. This is joint work with Weibo Gong (UMass Amherst), Zheng Fang (UMass Lowell), Benyuan Liu (UMass Lowell), and Xu Yuan (UMass Lowell).

Dr. Jie Wang is Professor and Chair of the Department of Computer Science at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell, USA. He is also Director of the Center for Network and Information Security in the university and co-Director of Cyber Forensics Lab in the department. He received his PhD in Computer Science from Boston University in 1991, Master of Engineering in Computer Science from Zhongshan University in 1985, and Bachelor of Sciences in Computational Mathematics from Zhongshan University in 1982. His research interests include computational complexity theory, combinatorial optimization algorithms, computational medicine, and network security. He has worked as a security consultant in financial industry. His recent research focus is on network dynamics, knowledge discovery, and wireless sensor networks. His research has been funded by the NSF since 1991. IBM, Intel, Google and the Natural Science Foundation of China have also funded his research. He has published over 120 research papers in some of the most prestigious journals and conference proceedings. He has authored and co-authored three books; edited and co-edited four books. He is active in professional service, including chairing conference program committees, serving as journal editors, and organizing conferences and workshops.