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

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

NEW: Multiple post-doctoral research associate positions are available to support catastrophe modeling and probailistic analyses.

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. During his most recent sabbatical, 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:
- Community Resilience: 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

Fall 2020: CSE 160 - Introduction to Data Science
Spring 2020: CSE 160 - Introduction to Data Science
(earlier courses)

Office Hours for Fall 2020

Mondays 2:30-3:30 and Thursdays 1-2pm (email for zoom link, all 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 (2018-2020).
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 WSDM 2021, 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: WSDM 2021 Tutorials, BigData 2020, SIGIR 2020 Short Papers, 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
Oct 24-26 2019	University of Stavanger, Norway	Examiner for a doctoral dissertation
Feb 3-7 2020	Houston, TX	WSDM 2020 Conference
Mar 15-present	Bethlehem, PA	Online with Zoom for the pandemic

Fall 2020 Schedule (but see Google Calendar at right for specific days)

When	Where	What
Mon 9:30-10:30pm	Online	Meeting
Mon 1:30-2:30pm	Online	Office Hour
Mon 2:30-3:30pm	Online	IRI Directors Meeting (biweekly)
Mon 3:30-4:30pm	Online	Research meeting
Tue 12:15-1:15pm	Online	CSE Dept Mtg (biweekly)
Tue 12:15-1pm	Online	Meeting (biweekly)
Tue 2-3pm	Online	I-DISC Leadership (biweekly)
Wed 10:30-11am	Online	Research meeting
Wed 11-noon	Online	Research Group Meeting
Wed 1:30-2:30pm	Online	CSE 160: Intro to Data Science
Wed 4-5pm	Online	Meeting
Thu 1-2pm	Online	Office Hour
Thu 4:00-5:00pm	Online	Research Teleconference
Fri 9-10am	Online	Research meeting (biweekly)
Fri 10-noon	Online	College of Education Faculty Meeting (once a month)
Fri 10-11am	Online	Community Resilience Research Meeting
Fri 11-noon	Online	Dataset Search Research Meeting (biweekly)

Other items of interest

Dr. Davison in the news

My advice to Lehigh students. Updated January 2018

Current postdocs:

Wenjuan Sun

Current students:

Eashan Adhikarla, Zhiyu Chen, Dan Luo, and Youshan Zhang.

Recent visitors:

Dr. Xiannong Meng

Former undergraduate students:

Faith Komlo

Former graduate students:

Jennifer Bayzick Tannenbaum

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: 8 September 2020