Brian D. Davison, Lehigh University, Computer Science and Engineering Dept.

Picture of Brian

Brian D. Davison, Ph.D.
Pronouns: He/him/his

Department of Computer Science and Engineering
P.C. Rossin College of Engineering and Applied Science
Lehigh University

A post-doctoral research associate position is available to support an interdisciplinary, multi-investigator effort in data-driven inference and control of dynamic systems to start in early to mid-2020.
Applications are being accepted for our Intelligent and Scalable Systems REU Site for summer 2020!

Dr. Brian D. Davison is an associate professor of computer science and engineering and director of the undergraduate minor in data science. He teaches courses on data science, data mining, web search engines, networking, system administration, and C and UNIX programming. He heads Lehigh's Web Understanding, Modeling, and Evaluation (WUME) laboratory and serves as editor-in-chief of the ACM journal, Transactions on the Web. While on sabbatical during the 2013-2014 academic year, he worked in the Core Data Science group at Facebook. Dr. Davison earned his B.S. from Bucknell University and his M.S. and Ph.D. in Computer Science from Rutgers University. His research includes search, mining, recommendation and classification problems in text, on the Web and in social networks. He is an NSF Faculty Early Career award winner. Dr. Davison's research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, Microsoft, Amazon, and Sun Microsystems.

Dr. Davison's CV is also available.

Research

Publications
The Web Understanding, Modeling and Evaluation Lab
Current externally-funded projects:
- The PRAISys project (NSF)
- Lehigh's Intelligent and Scalable Systems REU Site (NSF)
- Domain-Agnostic Dataset Search (NSF)
Other interdisciplinary projects:
- Perceptions Shaping Reality in Disaster Recovery
- Efficient, Explainable and Robust Data Scientific Methods for Smart Engineering Systems
Steering Committee Member, Institute for Data, Intelligent Systems and Computation (I-DISC)
Member, Institute for Cyber Physical Infrastructure and Energy (I-CPIE)

Teaching

Spring 2020: CSE 160 - Introduction to Data Science
Fall 2019: CSE 160 - Introduction to Data Science
Fall 2019: CSE 252 - Computers, Internet and Society
(earlier courses)

Office Hours for Winter 2019/2020

By appointment (in BC 233 or via videoconferencing)

Service

Editor-in-chief of ACM Transactions on the Web (since 2015).
Associate Editor of Frontiers in Big Data, Data Mining and Management Section (since 2018).
Chair, WSDM Conference Steering Committee (since 2018).
Organizer or co-organizer of SIGIR 2018, WSDM 2017, SIGIR 2016, SIGIR 2015, WSDM 2014, AppWeb 2012, WSDM 2010, CES/HPC 2009, AIRWeb 2007, ECML/PKDD 2007 GraphLab Workshop, AIRWeb 2006, AIRWeb 2005, WCW 2003.
Track chair, area chair or senior program committee member of SIGIR 2020, WWW 2020, WSDM 2020, CIKM 2019, SIGIR 2019, WWW 2019, WSDM 2019, WWW 2018, WSDM 2018, SIGIR 2017, WSDM 2017, IJCAI 2016, WWW 2016, WSDM 2016, CIKM 2015, WWW 2015, CIKM 2014, SIGIR 2014, AAAI 2014, SIGIR 2013, AAAI 2011, WWW 2011, KDD 2010.
Additional program committee membership in the past decade: HotWoT 2019, BigData 2019, SDM 2019, BigData 2018, HotWoT 2018, BigData 2017, HotWeb 2017, WWW 2017, CIKM 2016, HotWeb 2016, ACL 2016, WI-IAT 2015 Special Session on Quality of User Generated Content, ASONAM 2015, KDD 2015, SIGIR 2015 Workshop on Privacy-Preserving IR, WSDM 2015, WWW 2014, WebQuality 2014, WSDM 2014, KDD 2013, ICWSM 2013, WebQuality 2013, WWW 2013, WSDM 2013, CIKM 2012 Demos, SIGIR 2012, TAIA 2012, SOMA 2012, ICWSM 2012, WWW 2012, WebQuality 2012, LSNA 2012, WSDM 2012, WSCD 2012, SPIRE 2011, KDD 2011, ICWSM 2011, SIGIR 2011, WebQuality 2011, WSDM 2011, WSDM 2011 Workshops.
Reviewer for multiple book publishers and many conferences and journals.

Recent and Upcoming Travel Plans

When	Where	What
Feb 11-15 2019	Melbourne, Australia	WSDM 2019 Conference
Mar 10-13 2019	San Francisco Bay Area, CA	Teaching an Intro to Data Science short course
Oct 24-26 2019	University of Stavanger, Norway	Examiner for a doctoral dissertation
Feb 3-7 2020	Houston, TX	WSDM 2020 Conference
Apr 29-May 1 2020	Chicago, IL	NSF CISE REU PI Meeting

Winter 2019/2020 Schedule (but see Google Calendar at right for specific days)

When	Where	What
Tue 1:15-2pm	BC 233	Research meeting
Tue 2-3pm	BC 233	Research meeting
Tue 3-4pm	BC 233	Research meeting
Wed 11:30-12:30pm	ATLSS	PRAISys Research Meeting (biweekly)
Wed 11:30-12:30pm	BC 233	Research Meeting (biweekly)
Thu 2:30-3:00pm	BC 233	Research Meeting
Thu 3:00-4:00pm	Online	Research Teleconference
Fri 9:30-10:30am	BC 324	Research Group Meeting

Other items of interest

Dr. Davison in the news

My advice to Lehigh students. Updated January 2018

Current postdocs:

Current students:

Recent visitors:

Dr. Xiannong Meng

Former undergraduate students:

Former graduate students:

Jennifer Bayzick Tannenbaum

Shruti Bhandari

Kalyan C. Boggavarapu

Kiran K. Komaravolu

David B. Lewanda

David G. Deschenes

To Reach Me

Email: davison(at)cse.lehigh.edu
Office: Building C, Room 233

Mailing Address:
Department of Computer Science and Engineering
Lehigh University
113 Research Drive (Building C)
Bethlehem, PA 18015-4731

A few sayings that I like (the wording is mine, but I've probably picked up the content elsewhere)

Everything in moderation, also known in Latin as Modus omnibus in rebus.
-- Ancient Greek Proverb (the Latin is from Plautus).
Never ascribe to malice what you can ascribe to stupidity -- especially your own.
-- See Hanlon's Razor and M.N. Plano's version
The best-laid schemes o' mice an' men; Gang aft a-gley
-- Robert Burns: To a Mouse (original Scots)

Love like there is no tomorrow.
-- Multiple popular references
The perfect is the enemy of the good.
-- Voltaire (loosely translated from the French)
A PhD doesn't mean you are an expert in any particular subject; it just means that you could become one if you wanted to.
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. But, in practice, there is.
-- Jan L. A. van de Snepscheut (attributed)

Last modified: 17 January 2020