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I am a researcher in the Internet Services Research Center at Microsoft Research.
My interests are in using social data to help people find what they want and need. To this end, I use data from social networks to better understand people and their intents, to support exploration of relevant information, and to directly answer questions. My work involves a mix of research in social networking, content analysis, information retrieval, and various forms of big data analysis.
My previous research interests include JavaScript application monitoring and optimization, as well as improving the reliability of Internet services architectures and operations. I earned a Ph.D. and M.S. in computer science from Stanford University, and a B.S. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from U.C. Berkeley. |
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Projects
My current projects focus on mining new kinds of information about the world from social media, and using social network data for search ranking.
See my recent talks at Rutgers and UC Berkeley for an overview of my work on mining social media.
Past social network-related projects
KISS: On the systems-side, I'm also collaborating with Bimal Viswanath (MPI-SWS), Stefan Saroiu (MSR), and Krishna Gummadi (MPI-SWS) on the "Keeping Information Safe from Social networking apps" project. We call it KISS for short. To protect the privacy of user data from untrusted 3rd-parties, we're building a practical system for cloud hosting of social networking apps that enforces strong limits on how data is used.
U Rank, a search engine front end to support light-weight search editing and sharing. U Rank was prototyped externally in October 2008. [readwriteweb|pcworld|seattlepi]
The Social Web Experience browser toolbar analyzes Web pages and finds related content from your social networks. Your friends' recent status updates and messages, favorite movies, interests, and other profile information are shown when its related to what you're seeing on the Web. This project motivated our work on entity recognition in social media, now in use in several products at Microsoft.
Activities
WSDM 2012, PC; Intl. Conf. on Web and Social Media (ICWSM 2011, 2012) PC; Workshop on Language in Social Media (LSM 2011, 2012) PC; Symp. on Cloud Computing (SOCC 2011) PC; Intl. Conf. on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN 2010,2011) PC; Usenix Webapps (WebApps 2011, 2012) PC; Intl. Conf. on Autonomic Computing (ICAC 2008-2012) PC, PC Chair in 2010.
I also co-founded the SysML series of workshops (now SLAML) and taught a reading course at UW on applying machine learning techniques to systems problems. CSE 599N home page.
Recent Talks
Rutgers Yahoo Data Science Seminar, Feb 22, 2012. "Learning about the world through social media"
Berkeley Cloud Seminar, Feb 13, 2012. "Learning about the world through social media"
Past systems-related projects
AjaxScope, aka AjaxView, is a tool that allows web app developers to efficiently monitor the real-world, in-browser behavior of their JavaScript code without special browser plugins or extensions. We have an SOSP paper about the project and released our research prototype. AjaxScope also became Visual Studio 2008 AJAX Profiling Extensions Power Tool (say that 3 times fast!).
Doloto is a system that analyzes application workloads and automatically performs code splitting of existing large Web 2.0 applications. Doloto improves page-load times for large complex web applications by 20-40%. See our FSE paper and download the prototype at DevLabs.
Internally, I've also worked on surveys of the architecture, operations and reliability of Microsoft's large-scale Internet services; and more recently our usage of social network data in search.
During my PhD, I worked on monitoring for high-level application faults in Internet services. I continued this work at MSR, with more of an end-to-end perspective, looking at wide-area network failures as well as web application challenges (e.g., AjaxScope).
Bimal Viswanath, Emre Kıcıman, and Stefan Saroiu, Keeping Information Safe from Social Networking Apps, in Proceedings of the Workshop on Online Social Networks (WOSN'12), ACM, 17 August 2012
Emre Kıcıman, OMG, I have to Tweet that! A Study of Factors that Influence Tweet Rates, in The 6th Intl. Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM), American Association for Artificial Intelligence , 4 June 2012
Andres Monroy-Hernandez, Emre Kıcıman, danah boyd, and Scott Counts, “Narcotweets”: Social Media in Wartime (poster paper), in The 6th Intl. Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM), American Association for Artificial Intelligence , 4 June 2012
Emre Kıcıman, Language Differences and Metadata Features on Twitter, in Web N-gram Workshop at SIGIR 2010, ACM, 23 July 2010
George Danezis, Tuomas Aura, Shuo Chen, and Emre Kıcıman, How to share your favourite search results while preserving privacy and quality, in Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium, Springer, 21 July 2010
Emre Kıcıman and Ben Livshits, AjaxScope: A Platform for Remotely Monitoring the Client-side Behavior of Web 2.0 Applications, in the 21st ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP'07), Association for Computing Machinery, Inc., October 2007
Benjamin Livshits and Emre Kıcıman, Doloto: Code Splitting for Network-Bound Web 2.0 Applications, in Foundations of Software Engineering (FSE), Association for Computing Machinery, Inc., November 2008
Chad Verbowski, Emre Kıcıman, Brad Daniels, Arunvijay Kumar, Yi-Min Wang, Roussi Roussev, Shan Lu, and Juhan Lee, Flight Data Recorder: Always-on Tracing and Scalable Analysis of Persistent State Interactions to Improve Systems and Security Management, in The 7th USENIX Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI '06), USENIX, November 2006
Emre Kıcıman, Benjamin Livshits, Madanlal Musuvathi, and Kevin C. Webb, Fluxo: A System for Internet Service Programming by Non-expert Developers, in ACM Symposium on Cloud Computing, Association for Computing Machinery, Inc., 2010
Contact Info:
| E-mail: | emrek@microsoft.com |
| Post: |
Emre Kıcıman Microsoft Corporation One Microsoft Way Redmond, WA 98052 |
| Office Phone: |
+1 (425) 705-3659 |
