Professor Panagiotis Takis Metaxas, Computer Science, Wellesley College

Course Websites
CS114: Socio-Techno Web
CS215: Multimedia
CS230: Data Structures
CS331: Parallel Computing
CS315: Web Search

Video/Audio
Network Manipulation (Harvard CRCS)
Power, People and Social Media
Web Science: Understanding the Web(iTunes)
What Wellesley is Reading: Blown to Bits(iTunes)
Art App-reciation-The MAS program(youTube)

News Coverage
Social media as election predictor? Not so fast. (Politico)

Resources
Media Arts&Sciences Major
FPCC'95 FPCC'97
Parallel Computing CDROM

Family Pics that are so... last century, 2003, 2008

Dennis Downey:
Electric Thoreau
Textradio 2x2 3x3 4x4

Address: Computer Science Department, Wellesley College, Wellesley, MA 02481
Email: pmet...@wellesley.edu
Tel: 781-283-3054
Fax: 781-283-3642

@takis_metaxas

Office Hours:
Only by appointment. Prof. Metaxas is on sabbatical this year.

Modified: March 1, 2012

Panagiotis "Takis" Metaxas is a Professor of Computer Science and Founder of the Media Arts and Sciences Program at Wellesley College. Currently, he is a Visiting Scholar at Harvard University's Center for Research on Computation and Society (CRCS).

He studied Mathematics at the University of Athens and Computer Science at Brown University. He holds a M.Sc. and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Dartmouth and has been a visiting scientist at MIT and at the Sydney University, Australia. In the past he was Chief Technology Officer of a biotech company gaining FDA approval for computerized tests measuring the symptoms of mental disorders, and Research Associate at the Developmental Biopsychiatry Research Program at McLean Hospital. Since 2010, he has been on the faculty of the Albright Institute for Global Affairs.

His research interests are currently in Social Computing, Propagation of information and misinformation in cyberspace (including Web Spam) and Cognitive Hacking. His current research projects, funded by NSF, involve studying the predictive power of Social Network Data, especially related to prediction of political events, such as elections, and in developing a tool that will support the privacy of the user while evaluating the trustworthiness of the information the user receives. He has published in the areas of Web Science, Social Network Analysis, Parallel Computing, Multimedia, Algorithm Visualization, and Computer Science Education.
Below is a video of a talk that Prof Metaxas gave on Monday, October 17, 2011, at the Harvard CRCS on "Recognizing Network Manipulation: A short history and current challenges". (The reference to the questionnaire at the beginning of the talk is "Where do you look for an answer?")

Prof. Metaxas is a Senior Member of the ACM and a Member of LACS, IEEE Computer Society, SIGWEB, SIGCSE and SIGACT's electronic publication board. He also serves on the Program Committees for the WWW2012 Social Networks , AAAI-Web, WEBIST and ICIW conferences and the 40 years Celebration of the Computing Research Association (CRA). He is currently on the Advisory Board of XRDS and a Guest Editor for the Special issue of the Internet Research Journal on "The Power of Prediction with Social Media" and of the Special Issue of the Journal "Künstliche Intelligenz KI" on "Social Media".

He has received three best conference papers awards (2008, 2009, 2010) and two Apgar awards for teaching excellence (1996-97, 2009-10). His Erdös number is 3 (e.g., Erdös, Chung, Leighton), and his Ph.D. genealogy connects him to legends such as Carathéodory, Euler and Copernicus.
He does not like to use FaceBook, but you may want to follow him on Twitter. or read his blog When Computation meets Society, it gets interesting! .

PUBLICATIONS

On Misinformation Propagation, Electoral Predictions, Web Science On Parallel Computing On Image Dithering / Halftoning On Multimedia and Algorithm Visualization On Education and Curricula

On Misinformation Propagation, Electoral Predictions, Web Science
Misinformation and Propaganda in Cyberspace, Blog post at the Truthiness in Digital Media Symposium at Harvard University, March 6-7, 2012.

Hiding in Plain Sight: A Tale of Trust and Mistrust inside a Community of Citizen Reporters, with Eni Mustafaraj, Samantha Finn and Andrés Monroy-Hernández. ICWSM Conference, Dublin, Ireland, June 2012.

Why Is the Shape of the Web a Bowtie?. World Wide Web (WWW) Conference, WebScience Track, Lyon, France, April, 2012.

Trails of Trustworthiness in Real-Time Streams (Extended Summary), with Eni Mustafaraj. Design, Influence and Social Technologies, DIST Workshop at ACM Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), Seattle, WA, February, 2012.

Vocal Minority versus Silent Majority: Discovering the Opinions of the Long Tail, with Eni Mustafaraj, Samantha Finn and Carolyn Whitlock. IEEE SocialCom Conference, Boston, MA, October, 2011.

How (Not) To Predict Elections, with Daniel Gayo-Avello and Eni Mustafaraj. IEEE SocialCom Conference, Boston, MA, October, 2011. Press coverage: Wall Street Journal, Politico An earlier version appeared at Limits of Electoral Predictions using Twitter, ICWSM11 Conference, Barcelona, Spain, July, 2011.

What Edited Retweets Reveal about Online Political Discourse, with Eni Mustafaraj. AAAI-11 Workshop on Analyzing Microtext, San Francisco, August, 2011.

On the Predictability of the U.S. Elections through Search Volume Activity, with Catherine Lui and Eni Mustafaraj. e-Society Conference, Avila, Spain, March, 2011. Press coverage: Journalist's Resource

From Obscurity to Prominence in Minutes: Political Speech and Real-Time Search, with Eni Mustafaraj. Web Science 2010 Conference, Best Paper Prize. Raleigh, NC, April, 2010. Presentation slides are available. This work coined the term "Twitter-bomb" and was the inspiration for the truthy project. Press coverage (selected): CNN, The Atlantic, MIT Technology Review, NPR Science Friday, Huffington Post, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Boston Globe, Radio-Canada.

How to create a Smart Mob: Understanding a Social Network Capital, with Ashley Hubbard Harmon. e-Democracy Conference, Freiburg, Germany, July, 2010. Presentation slides are available.

Enhancing Information Reliability through Backwards Propagation Of Distrust. Intl. Journ. on Advances in Security, IARIA, 2009. Best Paper Award. An earlier version appeared in Social and Legal Aspect of Internet Computing, ICIW 2009 Conference, Venice, Italy, May, 2009.

Web Spam, Social Propaganda and the Evolution of Search Engine Rankings. Lecture Notes BIP, Springer-Verlag, 2010. An earlier version appeared in WEBIST 2009 Conference, Lisbon, Portugal, March, 2009.

The use of online videos in the 2008 US congressional elections with Eni Mustafaraj and Catherine Grevet. SocialComm 2009 Conference, Vancouver, Canada, August, 2009.

Sponsored Search for Political Campaigning during the 2008 US Elections with Eni Mustafaraj. SIGIR 2009 -IRA, Boston, July, 2009.

The Battle for the 2008 US Congressional Elections on the Web with Eni Mustafaraj. WebScience 2009 Conference, Athens, Greece, March, 2009. Press coverage: Politico.

Coverage and Independence: New Quality Metrics for Web Search Results with Lilia Ivanova and Eni Mustafaraj. Lecture Notes BIP, Springer-Verlag, 2009. Best Paper Award. An earlier version appeared in WEBIST 2008 Conference, May, 2008.

How Google works (and why you should care) Keynote speech slides at the World Usability Day 2006, November 14.

Web Spam, Propaganda and Trust with Joe DeStefano. Presented at the AIRWeb05, May 10, 2005, Chiba, Japan. (With slides from the AIRWeb talk on Web Spam Detection.)

Of course it is true; I saw it on the internet. Critical Thinking in the internet Era. with Leah Graham. In the Communications of the ACM, May, 2003. frames are not supported

On Parallel Computing
Automatic Methods for Hiding Latency in Parallel and Distributed Computation. In the SIAM Journal of Computing. (2000)
A Note on Parallel Algorithms for Optimal h-v Drawings of Binary Trees, with G.E. Pantziou and A. Symvonis, Computational Geometry: Theory and Applications 9 (1998) 145-158.
Connected Components in $O(\log^{3/2} n)$ Parallel Time for the CREW PRAM. Journal of Systems Sciences 54 (2):227-242 (1997). An earlier version appeared in FOCS'91.
Optimal Parallel and Sequential Algorithms for the Single and Multiple Vertex Updating Problem of a MST. Algorithmica 16: 633-648. 1997.
Automatic Methods for Hiding Latency in High Bandwidth Networks. Appeared in the Proceedings of STOC'96.
Improved Methods for Hiding Latency in High Bandwidth Networks. Appeared in the Proceedings of SPAA'96.
A Parallel Algorithm for Computing Minimum Spanning Trees. Journal of Algorithms, 19:383-410 (1995). An earlier version appeared in SPAA'92.
Parallel Algorithms for Drawing Trees. Appeared in the Proceedings of ISAAC'94.
From Parallel to Sequential: Keeping Optimality in Algorithms. Appeared in the Proceedings of HERMIS'92.

Parallel Algorithms for Graph Problems. PhD Thesis, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH, 1992.
On Image Dithering / Halftoning
Parallel Digital Halftoning by Error-Diffusion, In the Proc. of the FCRC2003 Paris C. Kanellakis Workshop, San Diego, CA, June, 2003. An earlier version appeared in the Proceedings of the Parallel and Distributed Systems.
Optimal Parallel Error-Diffusion Dithering, Proceedings of the 1999 Electronic Imaging, SPIE, San Jose, CA, January, 1999.
Method and System for Parallel Error-Diffusion Dithering (Pat. Num 6,307,978 Awarder Oct 23, 2001). "A system is disclosed for error diffusion dithering. The system includes an input for receiving an input matrix representative of image data, and a plurality of processors. The plurality of processors processes the input matrix and provides output data. Each of the processors is in communication with at least a portion of the input matrix. At least one processor processes a portion of the input matrix defined at least in part by a substantially diagonal edge within the image matrix." This work is expected to lead to inexpensive faster printers and larger monitors.
On Multimedia and Algorithm Visualization
Experiences from Teaching an Interdisciplinary Multimedia Course, with N. Ribner. Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Multimedia Computing and Systems (ICMCS'99), Florence, Italy, June, 1999
The Art and Science of Multimedia, with N. Ribner. Proceedings of the 25th ACM International Conference on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques (SIGGRAPH98), Orlando, FL, August, 1998. For the last two pages in color, click here.
Assessing Instructional Technology. In: Building Electronic Educational Environments, S.D. Franklin and E. Strenski (Eds.), IFIP Conf. Proc., vol 166, Kluwer, 2000. ISBN 0-7923-7832-6.
The Roles of Video in the Design, Use, and Construction of Interactive Electronic Conference Proceedings with S. Rebelsky et.al. Journal of Universal Computer Science 4 (6), 1998.
Towards Multimedia Conference Proceedings. Appeared in the January 1996 issue of the CACM.
On User Interfaces for Educational Multimedia Applications, Proceedings of the 2nd IEEE International Conference on Multimedia in Education, Melbourne, Australia, August, 1996.
Conference on a Disk: A Successful Experiment in Hypermedia Publishing.. Appeared in ED-MEDIA '94.
A LaTeX to HyperCard Translator. In the Proceedings of ED-MEDIA '95.
vG: A System for Visualizing Graphs and Graph Algorithms. Interface in Macromedia Shockwave. Software written in C. Beta installation requires gcc, X Motif and UNIX. We are working to port vG as a Java applet. If you want to be notified or if you would like to become a beta tester, please send us email.
A Visualization System for Correctness Proofs of Graph Algorithms Computer Science Education (1993).

On Computer Science Education and Curricula
A 2007 Model Curriculum for a Liberal Arts Degree in Computer Science by the Liberal Arts Computer Science Consortium (LACS). In the Journal on Educational Resources in Computing (JERIC), 2007
Introductory Lectures in Data-Parallel Computing March 1996. Interactive Multimedia CD-ROM. Published by AKPeters, Ltd.
How Difficult is it to Think in Parallel?. A New Approach for Introducing Parallelism. Proceedings of the First Wellesley Forum on Parallel Computing Curricula, 1995.
Proceedings of the First Forum on Parallel Computing Curricula, 1995.
Proceedings of the Second Forum on Parallel Computing Curricula, 1997.
Parallel Computation: Practical Implementation of Algorithms and Machines, electronic publication on Interactive CD, TELOS/ Springer-Verlag, Santa Clara, CA, 1993.


Available in postscript , HTML , PDF or CD-ROM formats.