A “simple” college project can change a student’s life.

It happened to Vagelis Papalexakis when, as an undergraduate, he tackled his first data mining and machine learning project that involved extracting researcher and manuscript profiles and “literally fell in love with every aspect.”

Now, as an associate professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the Marlan and Rosemary Bourns College of Engineering, he directs his teaching efforts so that students have the same life-changing experience. 

“I am very passionate [about] figuring out ways to transmit this excitement about data science to as many young people as I can,” he said.

In recognition of the strength of his research and teaching excellence, Papalexakis has been appointed as the Ross Family Term Chair in Computer Science. The chair’s goal is to “recruit, retain, or recognize preeminent scholars to conduct leading-edge research in computer science and profoundly enrich the educational experience of BCOE students,” said department chair and professor Christian Shelton.

“Professor Papalexakis’s research in data science explores applications ranging from fake-news detection to gravitational wave detection to artificial intelligence (AI) that can explain its decisions,” Shelton said. “He expertly weaves his preeminent research into his classroom teaching, graduate-student mentorship, and data science outreach programs."

Papalexakis’s research spans the broad areas of data science, signal processing, machine learning, and artificial intelligence. A key focus of his research is developing  “methods for knowledge discovery out of complex data in such a way that the knowledge extracted can provide actionable insight to data stakeholders as well as improve the current state of AI,” he said.

“Since everything I do requires data, I have been focusing on a number of high-impact application domains in collaboration with domain expert stakeholders and collaborators, including cybersecurity, experimental physics, precision agriculture, neuroscience, transportation systems, and railway safety,” Papalexakis added.

The chair appointment, in addition to being a distinguished recognition, will also provide funding to support his research in data science and AI, such as enabling him to access more computational resources and enable more members of his lab to travel to research conferences and present and publicize their research.

Papalexakis described the chair appointment as a “distinct honor.”

“I was thrilled, honored, and humbled to hear the news,” Papalexakis said. “Such an honor does not come very often, and I feel an enormous debt of gratitude to everyone who helped make this happen, including students, collaborators, mentors, UCR colleagues, and the Ross family who generously endowed the chair position.”

Papalexakis has garnered a track record for excellence in data science research and teaching.

In 2021, Papalexakis was the recipient of the New Generation Data Scientist Award from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) International Conference on Data Science and Advanced Analytics. That same year, he received a National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER award, which marks a promising young scholar in the early stage of their career. Papalexakis was named the recipient of a 2022 IEEE International Conference on Data Mining Tao Li Award.

“I find the combination of "application and data driven methods development” style of data science and AI work to be extremely exciting and motivating ever since I was an [electronic and computer engineering] undergrad student myself and I encountered the first such project that quite literally defined most of my later life,” Papalexakis said

This project — which later became his undergraduate thesis — involved automating the matching of scientific manuscripts to peer reviewers who are experts in the topic of the manuscript. At the time, such systems didn’t exist. 

“This made the project even more exciting,” Papalexakis said. “While working on that project I literally fell in love with every aspect, from collecting data to formulating the problem mathematically, to coding up solutions and testing them. But my absolute favorite part was discovering existing research papers that were tackling similar problems and diving into them trying to understand them and adapt what could be useful to my work.”

“It is mind blowing that a ‘simple’ college project can change your life, but this was the case for me, and I have seen that to be the case for many others,” he added.
 

Papalexakis is also the co-facilitator of the Data Science Challenge at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. The challenge is an intensive, two-week internship that places both UC Riverside and UC Merced students into multidisciplinary teams, each with a data scientist and a Ph.D. student as a team lead. Students learn from technical experts and laboratory mentors, participate in tours, seminars, and networking opportunities, and are tasked with developing solutions to real-world, data-science problems. 

“I am very passionate in figuring out ways to transmit this excitement about data science to as many young people as I can, and initiatives such as the Data Science Challenge is a prime example of a vehicle for achieving that goal,” Papalexakis said. “So what keeps me going is seeing my younger self in those students that I reach out to, and hoping that through our interactions some of them will find their passion the same way I did.”

Some of his research has involved using Google trends to identify symptoms unique to COVID-19, developing tools to identify online misinformation, and improving the detection of gravity waves in a collaboration with the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO).

His work has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the Army Research Lab, the Department of the Navy, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the U.S. Department of Transportation, and technology companies including Adobe Inc., Snap Inc., and Cisco.

The chair was endowed by the Imogene and Howard Ross family, which has deep ties to BCOE, UC Riverside, the Riverside community, and the Bourns family, who are the college founders of BCOE.