I work in the
School of Computing
Queen's University
Kingston. Ontario
Canada.
I am also an Adjunct Professor in the Mathematics and Computer Science Department of the Royal Military College.
Coordinator, Research in Information Security, Kingston (RISK).
My blog on adversarial knowledge discovery.
I am on sabbatical in Australia (GMT+11) so response to email will tend to be slower than usual, and I am trying not to take on extra responsibilities. I am, at present, working at Westmead Childrens Hospital in Sydney in the Oncology Research Unit.
Omniomics -- the study of data from biological systems
The Feynman Problem Solving Algorithm: 1) Write down the problem. 2) Think very hard. 3) Write down the solution.
Aibohphobia -- fear of palindromes.
"Perspective is the most valuable commodity on the planet." David Allen
"The optimist looks at the glass and says the glass is half full.
The pessimist looks at the glass and says the glass is half empty.
The engineer looks at the glass and says that the glass is twice as
big as it needs to be."
"When one teaches, two learn."
"I wake up every morning determined both to change the world
and have one hell of a good time.
Sometimes this makes planning the day a little difficult." E.B. White.
"There are 10 kinds of people in the world, those who understand binary and those who don't."
Highlights |
A report on an approach to privacy and personal data using cryptograhically strong artifical identities called personas, done for the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada, is available.
The Schedule for LACTS 2009 (Link Analysis, Counterterrorism, and Security) is now available.
My new book: Knowledge Discovery for Counterterrorism and Law Enforcement is available from
Spin by the U.S. Presidential candidates (updated Mar 18th), applying our work on deception detection to politics (see also results for the last Canadian Federal election below).
Proceedings: Link Analysis, Counterterrorism, and Security (LACTS2008) at the SIAM International Data Mining Conference, Atlanta, April 26th, 2008.
Tech report version of Anomaly Detection in Graphs (pdf).
Slides of my presentation at the workshop "A New Balance" at Privacy, Security Trust 2006 (PST2006) in Toronto, October 2006. The workshop explored the trade-offs between privacy and surveillance in a post-9/11 world. My talk summarizes our work in textual analysis of legal interception.
Slides of my talk on Measures to detect word substitutions in intercepted messages at ISI 2006 in San Diego.
The book Emergent Information Technologies and Enabling Policies for Counter-Terrorism, Wiley, is out. It contains a chapter where I show how matrix decompositions can be used for social network analysis.
We've applied some of our techniques for understanding mental states from word usage to election speeches in the Canadian federal election in February 2006. See the results here. Samples of the media coverage: New Scientist; Daily Planet on the Discovery Channel. Also National Post, Ottawa Citizen, Kingston Whig-Standard, Edmonton Journal, Calgary Herald, Sudbury Star, Sydney Morning Herald, Melbourne Age, The Guardian, The Daily Texan; CBC Radio National, Adler Online, Minnesota Public Radio, BBC Radio 5, Science Update (AAAS).
Two big ideas in counterterrorism
Beyond Keyword Filtering, a talk I gave at ISI 2005 in Atlanta.
The ATHENS system for novel information discovery.
Workshop on Link Analysis, Counterterrorism and Security at the SIAM Data Mining Conference, Newport Beach, April 23rd 2005. (2006 Workshop papers available on the web too.)
What I'm working on (updated 2008/09/01)
Research |
Top 10,000 CS researchers by impact (citation frequency)
Top 25 CS researchers at Canadian institutions by impact
My research at present is focused on the following topics:
However, the manipulation itself creates a signal that may be as easy to detect as the difference between normal records and manipulated records; and this difference can be increased by careful design of the analysis approach. I have been applying adversarial data mining and weak signal detection to counterterrorism and fraud.
More details can be found in this description of what I'm currently working on.
I head the Smart Information Management Laboratory.
Publications |
Online publications:
A reasonably up-to-date publication list for you to sort out references if necessary.
Research Activities This Year |
I am on the Steering Committee of the IEEE International Conference on Intelligence and Security Informatics, 2007-- .
I am on the Steering Committee of the SIAM International Conference on Data Mining, 2007--present.
I am on the Program Committee of the Workshop on High Performance Data Mining at ICDM in Pisa, December 2008.
I was on the Program Committee of Information Privacy and Security 2008, New Brunswick NJ, May 2008.
I was Poster Chair for the SIAM International Conference on Data Mining, Atlanta, April 2008.
I was on the Program Committee of the SIAM International Conference on Data Mining, Atlanta, April 2008.
I was on the Program Committee of the Workshop on Privacy, Security, and Trust in KDD (PinKDD'07), August 2007.
I was on the Program Committee of the IEEE Conference on Intelligence and Security Informatics, May 2007.
I was on the Program Committee of the Workshop on Intelligence and Security Informatics, China, April 2007.
I was one of the General Chairs of the SIAM International Conference on Data Mining in Minneapolis in April 2007.
I was on the Program Committee of Privacy, Security, Trust 2006, in Oshawa, in October 2006.
I was on the Program Committee of Intelligence and Security Informatics, in San Diego, in May 2006.
I was on the Program Committee of the Workshop on Intelligence and Security Informatics in Singapore in April 2006.
I was one of the General Chairs of the SIAM International Conference on Data Mining in Washington D.C. in April 2006.
I'm a member of the Editorial Board of the journal Statistical Analysis and Data Mining., Wiley.
I'm a member of the Editorial Board of the journal Scientific Programming.
I am an editor of The Journal of Universal Computer Science, Springer's first online journal.
I am an editor of Discrete Mathematics and Theoretical Computer Science for parallel computing.
Graduate Supervision |
I supervise theses in topics such as: adversarial knowledge discovery, and bioinformatics, especially analysis of high-throughput data. Have a look at what I'm currently working on.
Here is my Unofficial Guide to Graduate Admission. Please read this if you would like to work with me.
My current graduate students:
Some of my recent graduate students:
Research Resources
Mind mapping, a nice way to organise material when you don't already know how it fits together. It's useful for preparing drafts of theses and papers.
Teaching and Learning |
In the 2008-2009 academic year I taught:
I also supervise students in CISC499.
Here is some material on effective learning:
I am interested in hypermedia-based education.
Other Things |
Here are some of the interesting pathways via doctoral supervisors (there's more than one because some people had two supervisors; for example, Dirichlet was supervised jointly by Poisson and Fourier, who were both students of Lagrange):
Skillicorn - Stanton - Brauer - Schur - Frobenius - Weierstrass - Guderman - Gauss
Skillicorn - Stanton - Brauer - Schmidt - Hilbert - Lindemann - Klein - Lipschitz - Dirichlet - Poisson/Fourier - Lagrange - Euler - Bernoulli
Up to School of Computing
Up to Queen's University
David Skillicorn