Conference tutorials presented by the Data Lab, newest first. These are the survey-style introductions we give at KDD, TheWebConf, WSDM, SDM, and ICDM — they are the fastest way into a research area, and the materials below are free to use in your own teaching. Peer-reviewed papers are on our publications page; student theses are listed under theses & dissertations.
The Advantages of Adding Noise
Reyhaneh Abdolazimi and Reza Zafarani — TheWebConf (WWW) 2023
Why deliberately adding noise can improve algorithms rather than degrade them, across signal processing, machine learning, and network science.
- Companion survey: Harnessing the Power of Noise: A Survey of Techniques and Applications (ACM Computing Surveys)
Noise Enhancement: Techniques and Applications
Reyhaneh Abdolazimi and Reza Zafarani — SIAM International Conference on Data Mining (SDM) 2022
Noise-enhancement techniques and where they pay off, including noise-enhanced community detection and link prediction.
- Companion survey: Harnessing the Power of Noise: A Survey of Techniques and Applications (ACM Computing Surveys)
Interpretable Network Representations
Shengmin Jin, Danai Koutra (University of Michigan), and Reza Zafarani — TheWebConf (WWW) 2022
How to represent an entire network in a form a human can actually read — including network shapes, spectral representations, and the explainability of graph neural networks.
- Tutorial site — slides, video teaser, and full outline
- Try it: WebShapes, our interactive network-shape tool
Fake News Research: Theories, Detection Strategies, and Open Problems
Reza Zafarani, Xinyi Zhou, Kai Shu, and Huan Liu — ACM SIGKDD (KDD) 2019
A full day on fake news: what it is and how it differs from misinformation and satire, the theories behind it from psychology through economics, detection from the knowledge, style, propagation, and credibility angles, and the problems still open.
- Self-guided tutorial — the tutorial content as readable notes
- GUIDE research atlas — navigate the literature visually
- ACM proceedings entry
Fake News: Fundamental Theories, Detection Strategies and Challenges
Xinyi Zhou, Reza Zafarani, Kai Shu, and Huan Liu — ACM WSDM 2019
The earlier, shorter version of the fake news tutorial above.
- ACM proceedings entry
- Companion survey: A Survey of Fake News: Fundamental Theories, Detection Methods, and Opportunities (ACM Computing Surveys)
Social Media Mining: Fundamental Issues and Challenges
Mohammad Ali Abbasi, Huan Liu (Arizona State University), and Reza Zafarani — IEEE ICDM 2013
The tutorial that grew into our textbook.
- Slides (PDF)
- Tutorial page
- Textbook and full lecture slides: Social Media Mining: An Introduction