Chris Augeri’s Research Site
Welcome!
I currently lead the informatics cluster at the Peter Kiewit Institute (PKI) at the University
of Nebraska (NU). A key
aspect of my role is to develop a framework that facilitates collaboration
between tenure-track and research faculty in conjunction with external
partners. My primary goal is building our network analysis research group with
a focus on social media, an effort hearkening back to earlier gigs in industry,
government, and academia. Our other research thrust is related to advancing
knowledge discovery initiatives that can significantly improve our day-to-day
lives. I also occasionally muse
about how such ideas intersect information processing in local, state, and
federal government applications.
My
thoughts on influencing networks hearken back to my earlier work on identifying
critical nodes in networks, such as finding key nodes in flu pandemics and
unmanned vehicle networks. Recent examples include developing a thought arc
linking various graph analytics to real-world applications, which I fondly
referred to as an exercise in mapping theory to practice. A related aspect of
that work involved developing methods to positively or negatively influence the
growth of arbitrary networks, as well as collaborating on various text analytic
efforts. Our group is also exploring research on enriching and anonymizing
networks extracted from semantically rich environments.
One
area about which I am particularly excited is the increase in shallow data mining
driven by the rise of “big data”. For instance, although some “big data”
analysis needs are met by applying “big iron”, such as GPUs, useful results can
also be obtained by computing approximate results after sparsifying
the raw data. We are exploring combining those methods with various techniques
that I and others have developed, such as applying graph isomorphism tools to accelerate the PageRank algorithm.
Hopefully, this approximation through
sparsification work will yield useful methods to accelerate various graph
theory &/or linear algebra algorithms that are used in knowledge discovery
and search applications.
In
the past, I’ve also performed work on data flow in UAV swarms, such as
developing a communications protocol library, defining a swarm design paradigm,
creating a swarm simulation environment, and developing the inverted skip graph
to improve distributed indexing performance in mobile applications. Other
efforts yielded results
in XML compression and visual cache simulators for undergraduates.
Other
memorable stints included work as an assistant professor of computer science at
the U.S. Air Force Academy (USAFA).
I also taught introductory algebra at the University of Nebraska-Omaha (UNO) and helped stave off
Y2K and other more significant network disasters while at Integrated Solutions.
If you’d like to discuss any of these thoughts or any other matter, please send
me an email by clicking my name below.
All the best,