James Caverlee

Assistant Professor

Department of Computer Science

and Engineering

Texas A&M University

 

Email

  [my_last_name]@cse.tamu.edu

Office

  Room 403

  H.R. Bright Building

Phone

  (979) 845-0537

  (979) 847-8578 Fax

Snail Mail

  Dep’t of Computer Science and Engineering

  Texas A&M University

  TAMU 3112

  College Station, TX 77843-3112

Howdy!

I direct the Web and Distributed Information Management Lab (infolab) at Texas A&M and I’m also affiliated with the Center for the Study of Digital Libraries. Before arriving in Texas, I spent some time at Georgia Tech and at Stanford.


Our research lab focuses on Web-scale information management, distributed data-intensive systems, and social computing. Recently, we have been investigating questions related to:

  1. •Mining and modeling information quality and trust in social information systems;

  2. •Developing new models of social information search, exploration, and knowledge discovery; and

  3. •Spam-resilient web-scale computing

News and Announcements

  1. •Attn Prospective Grad Students: The College of Engineering at Texas A&M has just announced a new 2010 National Excellence Fellowship (NEF) competition with a due date of February 1, 2010. The Level I fellowship provides $40K/yr, and is renewable for up to 4 years.  The Level II award provides $15K/yr and is renewable for up to 4 years, and includes a departmental commitment of a teaching or research assistantship for the term of the award. Note that applicants must be *new* Ph.D. students and US citizens or permanent residents who plan to enroll in fall 2010. More info here: http://engineering.tamu.edu/graduate/nef/. If you’re interested in applying to our department and working with me, please contact me soon.

  1. •IEEE SocialCom 2009: Two of our papers were accepted to the upcoming IEEE Int’l Conference on Social Computing: “Probabilistic Generative Models of the Social Annotation Process”  and “Ranking Comments on the Social Web”. The acceptance rate was only 9% (20 out of 224). So big congratulations to Said Kashoob, Elham Khabiri, and Chiao-Fang Hsu for great work!

  1. •Web Intelligence 2008: I traveled to Sydney Australia in December for the IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conference on Web Intelligence to present our work on exploring feedback models in  interactive tagging to extend the reach of social tagging to domains typically left out of the social web phenomenon (like email, corporate intranets, desktop archives, etc.).

  1. •IAP Poster Competition: MS student Chiao-Fang Hsu won 1st place in our Industry Affiliates Program poster competition for her work studying community preference of socially-generated metadata on the social news aggregator site Digg. Congratulations Chiao!

  1. •Google Research Award: We are happy to announce that our work on uncovering social spammers has been generously funded by a Google Research Award. Thank you Google!

  1. •Graduate Faculty Teaching Award: I was surprised to learn that I had been awarded the Spring 2009 Departmental Graduate Faculty Teaching Award. This is a great honor and I am very happy to be appreciated in this way.

  1. •ICWSM 2009: We had a great visit to San Jose in May for the AAAI 3rd International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media. Said Kashoob presented his paper on modeling social annotations in communities like Flickr and Delicious. Chiao-Fang Hsu and Elham Khabiri presented their poster studying Digg comments. Overall, it was a great conference.

  1. •REU Visitors for the Summer: Our lab is hosting two summer scholars as part of the NSF Research Experience for Undergraduates program: Bethany Waldmann and Emma Carlson (co-advised with Rick Furuta). If you see Bethany or Emma around campus, please say hello and welcome them to TAMU for the summer.

  1. •Google Faculty Summit in July: I’ll be traveling to the Google Faculty Summit at the end of July for what looks to be some very interesting talks and networking opportunities.

  1. •Fall 2009 First-Year Seminar: Attention all incoming first-year students: if you’re interested in Facebook, Wikipedia, Twitter, and other new social technologies and you’d like to dig a little deeper into the computer science at work in these systems, then sign up for UPAS 181: Computer Science in the Age of Twitter (Social Media and its Impact on Society).