Cloud Report by Prof. Jiawei Han from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

To understand the advances of data mining on big textual data, the College of Intelligence and Computing invited Prof. Jiawei HAN from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to attend and present a report at Peiyang Forum. The report titled as "Transforming Unstructured Text into Structured Knowledge: A Text-Mining Approach" was presented virtually on zoom.

This report was hosted by Associate Prof. Di JIN from the College of Intelligence and Computing. Vice Dean Qinghua HU also attended the report and delivered a welcome speech.

During the report, Prof. HAN shared his recent research topics. He pointed out that the real-world big data are largely dynamic, interconnected and unstructured text. It is highly desirable to transform such massive unstructured data into structured knowledge. Many researchers rely on labor-intensive labeling and curation to extract knowledge from such data. Such approaches, however, may not be scalable, especially when such texts are domain-specific and nonstandard (such as social media). “We vision that massive text data itself may disclose a large body of hidden structures and knowledge. Equipped with domain-independent and domain-dependent knowledge-bases, we can explore the power of massive data to transform unstructured data into structured knowledge.” Prof. HAN introduced a set of methods developed recently in his group for exploration such as joint spherical text embedding, discriminative topic mining, taxonomy construction, text classification, and joint sentiment analysis. “We show that data-driven approach could be promising at transforming massive text data into structured knowledge.” Prof. HAN summarized. A total of 400 teachers and students participated this “Cloud Report”. All participants responded enthusiastically to Prof. HAN’s report.

Prof. Jiawei Han is Michael Aiken Chair Professor in the Department of Computer Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is Fellow of ACM and Fellow of IEEE. He received ACM SIGKDD Innovation Award (2004), IEEE Computer Society Technical Achievement Award (2005), IEEE Computer Society W. Wallace McDowell Award (2009), and Japan's Funai Achievement Award (2018). He also served as co-Director of an NIH-funded Center of Excellence in Big Data Computing, KnowEnG, and Director of Information Network Academic Research Center (INARC) (2009-2016) supported by the Network Science-Collaborative Technology Alliance (NS-CTA) program of U.S. Army Research Lab.

By the College of Intelligence and Computing

Editor: Eva Yin