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Email: srijan@gatech.edu
[Google Scholar]

[Twitter]

I am an Assistant Professor at CSE, College of Computing at Georgia Institute of Technology. I direct the CLAWS Data Science research group. I develop data science and machine learning solutions for the pressing challenges pertaining to the safety, integrity, and well-being of users and communities on web and social media, and which impact public health, democracy, science, and society. I investigate the social and technological factors, such as the role of recommender systems, behind these problems. I also work to quantify the adversarial robustness of critical cybersafety methods. I create methods to improve the current technology and innovate the next-generation of adversarially-robust technology that can empower users and improve cybersafety broadly throughout the internet. Towards these ends, I have pioneered the development of platform integrity algorithm that are being used in production at Flipkart (India's largest e-commerce platform, acquired by Walmart) and have influenced Twitter's Birdwatch platform (comunity-driven misinformation detection platform) and Facebook's TIES system (integrity model used for misinformation, fake accounts, and ads payment risk detection).

Prior to Georgia Tech, I was a visiting researcher at Google AI, a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford University, and a PhD student at the University of Maryland. I am a recipient of the Facebook Faculty Research Award, Adobe Faculty Research Award, Class of 1969 Teaching Fellow, ACM SIGKDD Doctoral Dissertation Award 2018 runner-up, WWW 2017 Best Paper Award runner-up, Larry S. Davis Doctoral Dissertation Award 2017, and Dr. BC Roy Gold Medal.

My research interests are in web and social media safety and integrity (misinformation, hate, fraud), trustworthy AI, recommender systems, graphs.

Postdoc opening. There is an opening for one postdoc in my group, who will get to work on very exciting problems in recommendation systems and/or graphs. There will also be opportunities to work with real industry data. If you have done research in the recommendation systems area, please send me your CV asap at srijan@gatech.edu.

Recent News

  • Excited to part of the new NSF Convergence Accelerator program cohort to develop methods to help professional fact-checkers combat misinformation!
  • Excited to welcome Ms. Sara Abdali as the new CI Fellow postdoc in my group (from Jan 2022)!
  • Congratulations to Rohit, Bing, Caleb, and Sandeep for acceptance of two ASONAM 2021 paper on hate speech and reputation systems for community-based misinformationf detection!
  • Congratulations to Sejoon Oh for acceptance of CIKM2021 paper on a new data augmentation technique for tensor completion!
  • Congratulations to Bing He for acceptance of KDD2021 paper on adversarial attacks on malicious user detection systems!
  • Congratulations to my Ph.D. student, Sejoon Oh, on being selected as a ML@GT Fellow 2021!
  • Congratulations to my Ph.D. student, Sejoon Oh, on being selected as a Twitch Fellowship Finalist!
  • Paper on the multimodal deception accepted at ICWSM 2021.
  • Paper on the role of citizens in countering misinformation accepted at IEEE Big Data 2020. Congratulations to Bing!
  • Panelist at Maison workshop at CIKM 2020.
  • Giving a keynote talk at KDD 2020 TrueFact Workshop: Making a Credible Web for Tomorrow.
  • Thank you, Microsoft, for two AI for Health awards to support our work on COVID-19 infodemic.
  • Selected as a Class of 1969 Teaching Fellow at Georgia Tech.
  • Won a Facebook Faculty Research Award. Thank you, Facebook.
  • Awarded an NSF award to help understand and mitigate the mental health impact of COVID-19. Thank you, NSF!
  • Received 'Thank-A-Teacher' where students honor great teachers! Thanks to my CSE 6240 students.
  • Won a Microsoft Azure Award. Thank you, Microsoft!
  • Won a Adobe Data Science Faculty Research Award. Thank you, Adobe!
  • Joined Georgia Tech as an Assistant Professor!
  • After a wonderful time at Google AI Research, I will be joining Georgia Tech from Jan 2020!

Publications

For my complete list of publications, please refer to my Google Scholar profile.

Highlights (selected from the full list below)

  • PETGEN: Personalized Text Generation Attack on Deep Sequence Embedding-based Classification Models. [PDF] NEW!
    Bing He, Mustaque Ahamad, Srijan Kumar
    KDD 2021 – 27th ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, 2021
    [Project page with data and code] [Link to presentation (pptx)] [Link to presentation (pdf)]
  • Influence-guided Data Augmentation for Neural Tensor Completion. [PDF] NEW!
    Sejoon Oh, Sungchul Kim, Ryan Rossi, Srijan Kumar
    CIKM 2021 – 30th ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management, 2021
    [Project page with data and code]
  • Racism is a Virus: Anti-Asian Hate and Counterhate in Social Media during the COVID-19 Crisis NEW!
    Bing He, Caleb Ziems, Sandeep Soni, Naren Ramakrishnan, Diyi Yang, Srijan Kumar
    ASONAM 2021 – The 2021 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining
    [Project page with data and code]
  • HawkEye: A Robust Reputation System for Community-based Misinformation Detection NEW!
    Rohit Mujumdar, Srijan Kumar
    ASONAM 2021 – The 2021 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining
  • The Role of the Crowd in Countering Misinformation: A Case Study of the COVID-19 Infodemic. [PDF]
    Nicholas Micallef*, Bing He*, Srijan Kumar, Mustaque Ahamad, Nasir Memon (* = equal contribution)
    IEEE Big Data 2020 -- Full Paper, research track (top 15%)
    [Project page with data and code]
  • Predicting Dynamic Embedding Trajectory in Temporal Interaction Networks [PDF]
    Srijan Kumar, Xikun Zhang, Jure Leskovec
    KDD, 2019 – 25th ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, 2019

    • List of all publications

    Pre-prints

    1. M2P2: Multimodal Persuasion Prediction using Adaptive Fusion [PDF]
      Chongyang Bai, Haipeng Chen, Srijan Kumar, Jure Leskovec, V.S. Subrahmanian
      [Project page with data and code]

    Conference, Journal, and Other Publications

    1. PETGEN: Personalized Text Generation Attack on Deep Sequence Embedding-based Classification Models. [PDF] NEW!
      Bing He, Mustaque Ahamad, Srijan Kumar
      KDD 2021 – 27th ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, 2021
      [Project page with data and code] [Link to presentation (pptx)] [Link to presentation (pdf)]
    2. Influence-guided Data Augmentation for Neural Tensor Completion. [PDF] NEW!
      Sejoon Oh, Sungchul Kim, Ryan Rossi, Srijan Kumar
      CIKM 2021 – 30th ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management, 2021
      [Project page with data and code]
    3. Racism is a Virus: Anti-Asian Hate and Counterhate in Social Media during the COVID-19 Crisis NEW!
      Bing He, Caleb Ziems, Sandeep Soni, Naren Ramakrishnan, Diyi Yang, Srijan Kumar
      ASONAM 2021 – The 2021 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining
      [Project page with data and code]
    4. HawkEye: A Robust Reputation System for Community-based Misinformation Detection NEW!
      Rohit Mujumdar, Srijan Kumar
      ASONAM 2021 – The 2021 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining
    5. Evaluating Graph Vulnerability and Robustness using TIGER. NEW!
      Scott Freitas, Diyi Yang, Srijan Kumar, Hanghang Tong, Polo Chau
      CIKM 2021 – 30th ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management, 2021
      [Project page]
    6. Deception Detection in Group Video Conversations using Dynamic Interaction Networks. [PDF]
      Srijan Kumar, Chongyang Bai, VS Subrahmanian, Jure Leskovec
      ICWSM 2021 – 15th International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media, 2021
      [Project page with data]
    7. The Role of the Crowd in Countering Misinformation: A Case Study of the COVID-19 Infodemic. [PDF]
      Nicholas Micallef*, Bing He*, Srijan Kumar, Mustaque Ahamad, Nasir Memon (* = equal contribution)
      IEEE Big Data 2020 -- Full paper in research track
      [Project page with data and code]
    8. Higher-Order Label Homogeneity and Spreading in Graphs. [PDF]
      Dhivya Eswaran, Srijan Kumar, Christos Faloutsos
      WWW (The Web Conference), 2020 – World Wide Web Conference, 2020
      [Github page with code and data]
    9. User Engagement with Digital Deception
      Maria Glenski, Svitlana Volkova, Srijan Kumar
      Peer-reviewed book chapter in 'Disinformation, Misinformation, and Fake News in Social Media 2020' by Springer.
    10. Predicting Dynamic Embedding Trajectory in Temporal Interaction Networks [PDF]
      Srijan Kumar, Xikun Zhang, Jure Leskovec
      KDD, 2019 – 25th ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, 2019 [Oral presentation, research track (top 9%)]
      New dataset released: Account blocks on Wikipedia and Reddit. Link below.
      [Github page with code and data] [Slides] [Short explanation video]

      Included in the curriculum at: UCSD, Purdue University, LMU Munchen.

    11. Predicting the Visual Focus of Attention Prediction in Multi-person Discussion Videos [PDF]
      Chongyang Bai, Srijan Kumar, Jure Leskovec, Miriam Metzger, Jay Nunamaker, V.S. Subrahmanian
      IJCAI, 2019 – International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 2019
      New dataset released: 62 dynamic networks of who-interacts-with-whom. Link below.
      [Dataset] [Project page with demo]
    12. Predicting Dominance in Multi-person Videos [PDF]
      Chongyang Bai, Maksim Bolonkin, Srijan Kumar, Jure Leskovec, Judee Burgoon, Norah Dunbar, V.S. Subrahmanian
      IJCAI, 2019 – International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 2019
      [Dataset] [Project page with demo]
    13. Community Interaction and Conflict on the Web [PDF]
      Srijan Kumar, William L. Hamilton, Jure Leskovec, Dan Jurafsky
      WWW (The Web Conference), 2018 – World Wide Web Conference, 2018
      New dataset released: Reddit community-to-community interlinks and harassment attacks
      [Project page: Data and Code] [Presentation slides (pptx)] [Presentation slides (pdf)]

      Included in the curriculum at: University of Waterloo

      Press: Russian spam accounts are still a big problem for Reddit (Engadget), What Reddit Tells Us About Political Coalitions and Conflicts (The Atlantic), Most Reddit battles are started by 1 percent of communities (Engadget), Tiny percent of Reddit communities spark majority of conflicts (CNET), One Percent of Subreddits Are Responsible for Most of the Raids on Reddit (VICE), and more by Inverse, TheNextWeb, theregister.co.uk

    14. Rev2: Fraudulent User Prediction in Rating Platforms [PDF]
      Srijan Kumar, Bryan Hooi, Disha Makhija, Mohit Kumar, Christos Faloutsos, V.S. Subrahmanian
      WSDM, 2018 – 11th ACM International Web Search and Data Mining Conference, 2018
      New dataset released: Fraudsters on Amazon, Bitcoin networks, and Epinions.
      [Project page: Data and Codes] [Presentation slides (pptx)] [Poster]

      Included in the curriculum at: Stanford University

    15. False Information on Web and Social Media: A Survey [PDF]
      Srijan Kumar, Neil Shah
      Invited book chapter in Social Media Analytics: Advances and Applications, CRC Press, 2018
    16. Breaking Bad: Forecasting Adversarial Android Bad Behavior
      S. Li*, Srijan Kumar*, Tudor Dumitras, and V.S. Subrahmanian. (* indicates equal contribution).
      CyberSecurity, 2018 - From Database to Cybersecurity, 2018.
    17. Measuring the Evolution of a Scientific Field through Citation Frames. [PDF]
      David Jurgens, Srijan Kumar, Raine Hoover, Dan McFarland, Dan Jurafsky
      TACL, 2018 – Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, 2018
      [Project page with data] [Code]
    18. Demand-Driven Single- and Multitarget Mixture Preparation Using Digital Microfluidic Biochips.
      Shalu, Srijan Kumar, A. Singla, Sudip Roy, K. Chakrabarty, P. P. Chakrabarti, and B. B. Bhattacharya.
      TODAES, 2018 - ACM Transactions on Design Automation of Electronic Systems.
    19. An Army of Me: Sockpuppets in Online Discussion Communities. [PDF]
      Srijan Kumar, Justin Cheng, Jure Leskovec, V.S. Subrahmanian.
      WWW, 2017 – 26th International World Wide Web Conference, 2017

      Best Paper Award Honorable Mention


      [Presentation Slides]

      Included in the curriculum at: University of Michigan, Virginia Tech University, Stanford University, Penn State University, Saarland University, and University of Freiburg.

      Documentary: Familiar Shapes by Heather D. Freeman

      Press: Sock puppet accounts unmasked by the way they write and post (New Scientist), Tool unmasks online puppeteers (New Scientist, print version), Spotting sockpuppets with science (TechCrunch), Sock Puppet Accounts on the Internet Getting You Down? Here’s How to Spot Them (WOWscience)

    20. Predicting Human Behavior: The Next Frontiers.
      V.S. Subrahmanian, Srijan Kumar.
      Science, 2017 – Science, vol. 355, issue 6324, pp. 489, 2017
    21. Spectral Lens: Explainable Diagnostics, Tools and Discoveries in Directed, Weighted Graphs
      Sebastian Goebl, Srijan Kumar, Christos Faloutsos
      ICDM, 2017 – IEEE International Conference on Data Mining, 2017
    22. Data-Driven Approaches towards Malicious Behavior Modeling
      Meng Jiang, Srijan Kumar, V.S. Subrahmanian, Christos Faloutsos
      KDD, 2017 (Tutorial) – Tutorial at 23rd ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, 2017
    23. Antisocial Behavior on the Web: Characterization and Detection
      Srijan Kumar, Justin Cheng, Jure Leskovec
      WWW, 2017 (Tutorial) – 26th International World Wide Web Conference, 2017
    24. Edge Weight Prediction in Weighted Signed Networks. [PDF]
      Srijan Kumar, Francesca Spezzano, V.S. Subrahmanian, Christos Faloutsos
      ICDM, 2016 – IEEE International Conference on Data Mining, 2016

      Best of ICDM 2016.


      Top 10 most cited papers of ICDM in the last 5 years. [Link]


      New datasets released: Weighted, signed, temporal networks from Bitcoin OTC and Bitcoin Alpha.
      [Project page: Code] [Bitcoin OTC] [Bitcoin Alpha]
    25. Disinformation on the Web: Impact, Characteristics and Detection of Wikipedia Hoaxes. [PDF]
      Srijan Kumar, Robert West, Jure Leskovec.
      WWW, 2016 – 25th International World Wide Web Conference, 2016
      New datasets released: Hoax articles on Wikipedia
      [Project page: Data and Code]

      Included in the curriculum at: UIUC, University of Waterloo, McGill University, Texas A&M University, University of Hawaii, University of Freiburg, Leibniz University, Hannover, University of Waterloo, University of Alberta, University of Wellington, New Zealand, and Bari BigData winter school 2017.

      Press: Don't Ask Wikipedia To Cure the Internet (WIRED), Can Wikipedia Solve YouTube's Conspiracy Theory Problem? (Motherboard)

    26. Structure and Dynamics of Signed Citation Networks. [PDF]
      Srijan Kumar.
      WWW, 2016 companion - 25th International World Wide Web Conference companion, 2016.
      [Project page: Data and Code]
    27. Identifying Malicious Actors on Social Media
      Srijan Kumar, Francesca Spezzano, V.S. Subrahmanian
      ASONAM, 2016 tutorial – Advances in Social Network Analysis and Mining, 2016
    28. Stubborn Mining: Generalizing Selfish Mining and Combining with an Eclipse Attack. [PDF]
      Kartik Nayak*, Srijan Kumar*, Andrew Miller and Elaine Shi. (* indicates equal contribution).
      Euro S&P, 2016 - IEEE European Symposium on Security and Privacy, 2016.
    29. VEWS: A Wikipedia Vandal Early Warning System. [PDF]
      Srijan Kumar, Francesca Spezzano, V. S. Subrahmanian.
      KDD, 2015 – 21th ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, 2015
      New datasets released: Vandals and vandalism on Wikipedia
      [Project page: Data and Code]
    30. Linguisitic Harbingers of Betrayal: A Case Study on an Online Strategic Game. [PDF]
      Vlad Niculae, Srijan Kumar, Jordan Boyd-Graber, Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil.
      ACL, 2015 – 51st Conference of the Association for Computational Linguistics, 2015
      New datasets released: Deception in Diplomacy, a conversation-based online game
      [Project page: Data and Code]

      Press: Should you worry about people who are too polite? (CNN), When Diplomacy Leads to Betrayal (The Wall Street Journal), Here’s a Good Reason to Be Wary of Overly Polite People (New York Magazine) and more here.

    31. Layout-Aware Mixture Preparation of Biochemical Fluids on Application-Specific Digital Microfluidic Biochips. [PDF]
      Sudip Roy, Partha P. Chakrabarti, Srijan Kumar, Krishnendu Chakrabarty, Bhargab B. Bhattacharya.
      TODAES, 2015 - ACM Transactions on Design Automation of Electronic Systems, 2015.
    32. Demand-Driven Mixture Preparation and Droplet Streaming using Digital Microfluidic Biochips. [PDF]
      Sudip Roy, Srijan Kumar, P. P. Chakrabarty, B. B. Bhattacharya and K. Chakrabarty.
      DAC, 2014 - ACM/IEEE Design Automation Conference, 2014.
    33. Accurately Detecting Trolls in Slashdot Zoo via Decluttering. [PDF]
      Srijan Kumar, Francesca Spezzano, V. S. Subrahmanian.
      ASONAM, 2014 – Advances in Social Network Analysis and Mining, 2014
      New datasets released: Trolls in Slashdot, a signed social networking platform
      [Project page: Data and Code]
    34. Automatic Classification and Analysis of Interdisciplinary fields in Computer science. [PDF]
      T. Chakrabarty, Srijan Kumar, D. Reddy, Suhansanu Kumar, Niloy Ganguly and Animesh Mukherjee.
      SocialCom, 2013 - ASE/IEEE International Conference on Social Computing.
    35. Routing-Aware Resource Allocation for Mixture Preparation in Digital Microfluidic Biochips. [PDF]
      Sudip Roy, P. P. Chakrabarty, Srijan Kumar, B. B. Bhattacharya and K. Chakrabarty.
      ISVLSI, 2013 - IEEE International Symposium on VLSI, 2013.
    36. Efficient Mixture Preparation of Biochemical Fluids using Digital Microfluidic Biochip. [PDF]
      Srijan Kumar, Sudip Roy, P. P. Chakrabarti, B. B. Bhattacharya and K. Chakrabarty.
      DDECS, 2013 - Sixteenth IEEE Symposium on Design and Diagnostics of Electronic Circuits and Systems, 2013.

    For all publications, please see my Google Scholar.

    Students

    Ph.D. Students:

    • Sejoon Oh: adversarial ML, recommender systems
    • Bing He: misinformation (co-advised with Prof. Mustaque Ahamad)
    • Gaurav Verma: misinformation, mental health

    Masters and Undergraduate Students:

    • Shreeshaa Kulkarni: MS
    • Ankur Bhardwaj: MS
    • Rohit Mujumdar: MS
    • Manoj Niverthi: UG
    • Andrew Wang: UG

    Alumni:

    • Zan Huang: MS in Dec 2020. First employment: Kuaishou
    • Sunny Dhamnani

    Datasets

    Malicious, fake, fraud behavior and content:

    1. Bitcoin OTC platform: Fraudsters.
    2. Bitcoin Alpha platform: Fraudsters.
    3. Amazon network: Fake reviewers.
    4. Epinions network: Fake reviewers.
    5. Wikipedia edits: Blocked accounts.
    6. Reddit posting data: Blocked accounts misbehavior.
    7. Wikipedia articles: Hoax articles on Wikipedia.
    8. MOOC platform: Student drop out.
    9. Reddit community: Inter-community (subreddit to subreddit) harassment.

    Dynamic networks:

    1. Web of Trust Network: Bitcoin OTC platform. Signed, weighted, temporal.
    2. Web of Trust Network: Bitcoin Alpha platform Signed, weighted, temporal.
    3. Reddit: Community-to-community link network. Temporal, weighted.
    4. Wikipedia: User to page edit. Temporal, weighted, attributed.
    5. Reddit: User to subreddit posting activity.Temporal, weighted, attributed.
    6. MOOC platform: Student activity. Temporal.
    7. LastFM: User activity (listening to songs). Temporal.

    Processed datasets:

    1. Reddit: User and subreddit embeddings.

    Teaching