Padhraic Smyth, Ph.D. | Communications 2025

Padhraic Smyth

Professor

Department of Computer Science, Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Science

Speech Title:

"Data Mining of Human Behavior"

Abstract:

We can now collect data on unprecedented scales at the individual level, digitally recording a broad range of aspects of our daily lives: where we travel, who we communicate with, what information we consume, how we exercise, and so forth. To date this data has been leveraged primarily for commercial benefit (e.g., online advertising), rather than for the benefit of specific individuals. The next decade is likely to see a significant increase in the development of algorithms and tools that are focused on helping the individual, in areas such as health, energy-usage, time-management, and education. In this talk I will describe current research on analyzing large data sets in this context, based on machine learning and statistical techniques, with illustrations from a number of projects at UC Irvine and elsewhere in this arena.

Bio:

Padhraic Smyth is a Professor at the University of California, Irvine, in the Department of Computer Science with a joint appointment in Statistics, and is also Director of the Center for Machine Learning and Intelligent Systems at UC Irvine. His research interests include machine learning, data mining, pattern recognition, and applied statistics and he has published over 150 papers on these topics. He was a recipient of best paper awards at the 2002 and 1997 ACM SIGKDD Conferences, received the ACM SIGKDD Innovation Award in 2009, and was named a AAAI Fellow in 2010. He is co-author of Modeling the Internet and the Web: Probabilistic Methods and Algorithms (with Pierre Baldi and Paolo Frasconi in 2003), and co-author of Principles of Data Mining, MIT Press (with David Hand and Heikki Mannila in 2001).

Padhraic has served in editorial and advisory positions for journals such as the Journal of Machine Learning Research, the Journal of the American Statistical Association, and the IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering. While at UC Irvine he has received research funding from agencies such as NSF, NIH, IARPA, NASA, and DOE, and from companies such as Google, IBM, Yahoo!, Experian, and Microsoft. In addition to his academic research he is also active in industry consulting, working with companies such as eBay, Yahoo!, Microsoft, Oracle, Nokia, and AT&T, as well as serving as scientific advisor to local startups in Orange County. He also served as an academic advisor to Netflix for the Netflix prize competition from 2006 to 2009.

Padhraic received a first class honors degree in Electronic Engineering from National University of Ireland (Galway) in 1984, and the MSEE and PhD degrees (in 1985 and 1988 respectively) in Electrical Engineering from the California Institute of Technology. From 1988 to 1996 he was a Technical Group Leader at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, and has been on the faculty at UC Irvine since 1996.