Welcome!

The Computational Media Lab at the ANU focus on computational problems for understanding online media and their interactions with and among humans. We develop core methods in machine learning and optimization, and use them to formulate and solve problems in multimedia undestanding and online behavior analysis.

You may be interested in sampling the recent blog posts below, look at our research summary, publications, all past posts, or navigate by categories and tags.
Problems: social media popularity privacy language vision citations
Methods: deep learning stochastic process visualization
Meta: researchdata datasci news group-activity

Inverting a Random Walk - Problem SettingsPosted on Jan 3, 2017We discuss three approaches for graph inversion from steady state distribution of random walks. This first post compares the problem settings.

posted by Lexing Xie

Markov chains and random walk on graphs are long-standing subjects in applied math and related disciplines. Given a markov chain / transition matrix / graph, properties of the random walk such as steady state distribution, mixing time are well-studied. Only in recent years, however, the inverse problem has started gaining interest – that is, given some measurements after random walk on a graph, infer some version of the graph. This blog post compares three related but different problem settings in recent literature from (Kumar15), (Mackay15) and (Xie13).

Wombeyan Caves and National Cherry FestivalPosted on Dec 15, 2016We explore Australian caves and cherries in the second half of 2016.

posted by Siqi Wu, with edits from Lexing Xie

Australia has great weather for the ourdoors, no matter it’s winter or summer – that’s what we did, and here’s photo proof.

Conference Talks in October and November 2016Posted on Nov 15, 2016We gave presentations at ACM CIKM and the D2D CRC Annual Conference.

posted by Minjeong Shin and Lexing Xie

Our work received some pulicity in the “fall” conference season internationally and in Australia.

Feature Driven and Point Process Approaches for Popularity PredictionPosted on Aug 31, 2016We pbridge the gap between problem settings and approaches for predicting the size of a retweeting cascade.

posted by Swapnil Mishra

Predicting popularity as number of retweets a tweet will get is an important and difficult task. It’s unclear which approaches, settings and features works best. Our current CIKM ‘16 paper bridges this gap by comparing across feature driven and point process approaches under both regression and classification settings.

Learning Points and Routes to Recommend TrajectoriesPosted on Aug 31, 2016We present a novel approach to jointly rank points-of-interest and plan routes

posted by Dawei Chen

The problem of recommending tours to travellers is an important and broadly studied area. We consider the task of recommending a sequence of points-of-interest (POI), that simultaneously uses information about POIs and routes.

Probabilistic Knowledge Graph ConstructionPosted on Aug 31, 2016We propose a new probabilistic knowledge base factorisation that benefits from the path structure of existing knowledge.

posted by Dongwoo Kim

Relational knowledge graphs formalise our understanding about the world and help us reason and infer in a wide range of tasks. The construction of a knowledge graph is an active research area with many important and challenging research questions. Throughout this research, we address some important problems in the knowledge graph construction and propose novel statistical relational models to solve the problems.

Expecting to be HIPPosted on Aug 16, 2016This post outlines techniques for computing the expected event rate for Hawkes processes, or the so-called Hawkes Intensity Process (HIP).

posted by Lexing Xie

We give a brief overview to a new method for computing expected event rate in unit time for point processes. This is important for estimating interval-censored Hawkes processes – or when the volume of events, and not individual event times are known.

Group Activity: Climbing Mt. KosciuszkoPosted on Apr 2, 2016We climbed to the top of Australia -- Mt. Kosciuszko, braving strong gust and below-freezing windchill！

On the 2nd of April, group members climbed the top of Australia, Mt. Kosciuszko. Kosciuszko is the highest mountain in Australia a mountain with a height of 2,228 metres.