Prof. David Skillicorn

"Those heroes that shed their blood and lost their lives... you are now lying in the soil of a friendly country. Therefore rest in peace. There is no difference between the Johnnies and the Mehmets to us where they lie side by side here in this country of ours... You the mothers who sent their sons from far away countries wipe away your tears. Your sons are now lying in our bosom and are in peace. After having lost their lives on this land they have become our sons as well." Mustafa Kemal Atarturk, about Gallipoli.

Highlights

My upcoming book, Understanding High-Dimensional Spaces has been published by Springer.
(Print, Online)

I was awarded the 2009 IEEE Intelligent Transportation Systems Society and IEEE Systems, Man and Cybernetics Society Technical Committee on Homeland Security Technical Achievement Award for outstanding and sustained technical contributions to the field of Intelligence and Security Informatics.

My recent book: Knowledge Discovery for Counterterrorism and Law Enforcement is available from Taylor and Francis and Amazon

Research

My research is focused on adversarial knowledge discovery, building inductive models from data in settings where the interests of modellers and those being modelled are not aligned. This includes counterterrorism, law enforcement,and fraud; but also increasingly areas such as customer relationship modelling. I work with some TLAs and even some FLAs.

Publications

Online publications:

• Papers.
• Papers up to 2005
• Papers (pre 2000) on BSP design and performance, Parallel programming models, Hypermedia and applications, and Parallelism and structured text

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-- .

I am on the Program Committees of all of the usual data mining conferences and workshops, and also those related to security informatics.

I am an Associate Editor or on the Editorial Board of IEEE Intelligent Systems, Computational Intelligence, Journal of Universal Computer Science, Computational and Mathematical Organizational Theory, Springer Security Informatics, and Statistical Analysis and Data Mining.

Graduate Supervision

I supervise theses in topics in adversarial knowledge discovery, focusing on textual data and graph/relational data. I work with colleagues in Politics (spin, radicalization), Business (financial fraud), and Psychology (deception) so there are possibilities in interdisciplinary research in these directions as well.

My funding levels do not allow me to supervise international students unless they have funding from their own countries; this applies to summer students, graduate students, and postdocs.

My current graduate students:

• Nasser AlSadhan (exploiting systemic functional language models)
• Quan Zheng (graph structures)
• Monte Creasor (deeper language structures)

Some of my recent graduate students:

• Carolyn Lamb
• Scott Grant
• Pradeep Kondi Chandrasekaran
• Reg Sawilla
• Mike Bourassa
• Mohammad Hussain
• Geoff Morton
• Jim Provost
• Amin Fani Marvasti
• Tracy Jenkin
• Hanady Abdulsalam
• Samar Abou-Gouda
• Smita Gupta
• James Dutrisac
• Ayron Little

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.

Talking about your research.

Teaching and Learning

In the 2012-2013 academic year I am teaching:

• CISC101 (Fall 2012) - This is a new version of our introductory programming course, which will be taught using Matlab as the programming language, and data analysis (aka data mining or knowledge discovery) as the application domain. This will be its second offering. The course material is all on Moodle and so only visible to those enrolled in the course.
• CISC333 (Fall) - Data Mining (updated for Fall 2012). Although this course has a third year number, its prerequisites are mild and some students may wish to take it in Second Year.
• CISC 873 Data Mining (Fall 2012), an application token for the Ph.D. program.

I also supervise students in CISC499 -- topics for 2012-2013 are here.

Here is some material on effective learning:

• Effective Learning Techniques
• Playing with Internal Space
• Study Hacks

I am interested in hypermedia-based education.

Other Things

My Academic Genealogy

Here are some of the interesting pathways via doctoral supervisors (there's more than one because some people had two supervisors; for example, Brauer was supervised by both Schur and Schmidt, and 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