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U Kang

Seoul National University · Computer Science

About the Lab

Professor U Kang's research lab specializes in large-scale data analytics, with a focus on scalable graph and tensor mining for billion-node graphs and massive multi-dimensional data. The lab develops high-performance, distributed algorithms and systems—such as PEGASUS and HADI—designed to efficiently compute graph properties like diameter, radius, and centrality on Hadoop/MapReduce platforms. A key research direction involves rethinking traditional graph abstractions, proposing novel models like the hub-and-spoke structure and the Slash Burn method to improve layout, compression, and analysis of real-world networks. The lab also explores efficient tensor decomposition techniques for knowledge graphs, social networks, and streaming data, emphasizing scalability and real-world applicability.

graph mininglarge-scale analyticstensor decompositiondistributed systemsscalable algorithms

Research Overview

Papers
259
Total Citations
6,447
Papers (5y)
81
Primary Field
Computer Science

Research Output Trend

Figures are computed from collected data and may differ slightly.

Publications per year (5y)
81total
2021
2022
2023
2024
2025
Citations per year (5y)
735total
20212022202320242025

Selected Papers

15
1
Article|635 citations·2009
PEGASUS: A Peta-Scale Graph Mining System Implementation and Observations
U Kang, Charalampos E. Tsourakakis, Christos Faloutsos
FWCI 40.0

In this paper, we describe PEGASUS, an open source peta graph mining library which performs typical graph mining tasks such as computing the diameter of the graph, computing the radius of each node and finding the connected components. as the size of graphs reaches several giga-, tera- or peta-bytes, the necessity for such a library grows too. To the best of our knowledge, PEGASUS is the first such library, implemented on the top of the HADOOP platform, the open source version of MAPREDUCE. Many

Computer Vision and Pattern RecognitionComputer Science
2
Article|246 citations·2012
GigaTensor
U Kang, Evangelos E. Papalexakis, Abhay Harpale, Christos Faloutsos
FWCI 9.3

Many data are modeled as tensors, or multi dimensional arrays. Examples include the predicates (subject, verb, object) in knowledge bases, hyperlinks and anchor texts in the Web graphs, sensor streams (time, location, and type), social networks over time, and DBLP conference-author-keyword relations. Tensor decomposition is an important data mining tool with various applications including clustering, trend detection, and anomaly detection. However, current tensor decomposition algorithms are not

Computational MathematicsMathematics
3
Article|228 citations·2000
A high-speed capacitive humidity sensor with on-chip thermal reset
U Kang, K.D. Wise
SJR Q2FWCI 5.0IEEE Transactions on Electron Devices

This paper reports a high-speed capacitive humidity sensor integrated on a polysilicon heater. A response time of 1.0 s and a sensitivity of 30.0 fF/%RH have been obtained. High speed is achieved using multiple polyimide columns having diameters of a few microns and allowing moisture to diffuse into them circumferentially. Using structures that eliminate the air-gap capacitance between the columns, the simulated sensor output drifts by only 1% when the relative dielectric constant in the air reg

Electrical and Electronic EngineeringEngineering
4
Article|157 citations·2010
PEGASUS: mining peta-scale graphs
U Kang, Charalampos E. Tsourakakis, Christos Faloutsos
SJR Q2FWCI 12.9Knowledge and Information Systems
Computer Vision and Pattern RecognitionComputer Science
5
Article|137 citations·2011
Beyond 'Caveman Communities': Hubs and Spokes for Graph Compression and Mining
U Kang, Christos Faloutsos
FWCI 8.1

Given a real world graph, how should we lay-out its edges? How can we compress it? These questions are closely related, and the typical approach so far is to find clique-like communities, like the `cavemen graph', and compress them. We show that the block-diagonal mental image of the `cavemen graph' is the wrong paradigm, in full agreement with earlier results that real world graphs have no good cuts. Instead, we propose to envision graphs as a collection of hubs connecting spokes, with super-hu

Statistical and Nonlinear PhysicsPhysics and Astronomy
6
Article|133 citations·2011
Centralities in Large Networks: Algorithms and Observations
U Kang, Spiros Papadimitriou, Jimeng Sun, Hanghang Tong
FWCI 7.3

Node centrality measures are important in a large number of graph applications, from search and ranking to social and biological network analysis. In this paper we study node centrality for very large graphs, up to billions of nodes and edges. Various definitions for centrality have been proposed, ranging from very simple (e.g., node degree) to more elaborate. However, measuring centrality in billion-scale graphs poses several challenges. Many of the “traditional” definitions such as closeness a

Statistical and Nonlinear PhysicsPhysics and Astronomy
7
Article|131 citations·2011
HADI
U Kang, Charalampos E. Tsourakakis, Ana Paula Appel, Christos Faloutsos, Jure Leskovec
SJR Q1FWCI 14.0ACM Transactions on Knowledge Discovery from Data

Given large, multimillion-node graphs (e.g., Facebook, Web-crawls, etc.), how do they evolve over time? How are they connected? What are the central nodes and the outliers? In this article we define the Radius plot of a graph and show how it can answer these questions. However, computing the Radius plot is prohibitively expensive for graphs reaching the planetary scale. There are two major contributions in this article: (a) We propose HADI (HAdoop DIameter and radii estimator), a carefully desig

Statistical and Nonlinear PhysicsPhysics and Astronomy
8
Article|120 citations·2012
Fast Random Walk Graph Kernel
U Kang, Hanghang Tong, Jimeng Sun
FWCI 4.2

Random walk graph kernel has been used as an important tool for various data mining tasks including classification and similarity computation. Despite its usefulness, however, it suffers from the expensive computational cost which is at least O(n3) or O(m2) for graphs with n nodes and m edges. In this paper, we propose ARK, a set of fast algorithms for random walk graph kernel computation. ARK is based on the observation that real graphs have much lower intrinsic ranks, compared with the orders

Computer Vision and Pattern RecognitionComputer Science
9
Article|108 citations·2011
GBASE
U Kang, Hanghang Tong, Jimeng Sun, Ching‐Yung Lin, Christos Faloutsos
FWCI 8.1

Graphs appear in numerous applications including cyber-security, the Internet, social networks, protein networks, recommendation systems, and many more. Graphs with millions or even billions of nodes and edges are common-place. How to store such large graphs efficiently? What are the core operations/queries on those graph? How to answer the graph queries quickly? We propose GBASE, a scalable and general graph management and mining system. The key novelties lie in 1) our storage and compression s

Computer Vision and Pattern RecognitionComputer Science
10
Book Chapter|88 citations·2011
Spectral Analysis for Billion-Scale Graphs: Discoveries and Implementation
U Kang, Brendan Meeder, Christos Faloutsos
SJR Q2FWCI 19.4Lecture notes in computer science
Computer Vision and Pattern RecognitionComputer Science
11
Article|69 citations·2012
gbase: an efficient analysis platform for large graphs
U Kang, Hanghang Tong, Jimeng Sun, Ching‐Yung Lin, Christos Faloutsos
SJR Q1FWCI 5.8The VLDB Journal
Computer Vision and Pattern RecognitionComputer Science
12
Article|64 citations·2011
Mining large graphs: Algorithms, inference, and discoveries
U Kang, Duen Horng Chau, Christos Faloutsos
FWCI 7.3

How do we find patterns and anomalies, on graphs with billions of nodes and edges, which do not fit in memory? How to use parallelism for such terabyte-scale graphs? In this work, we focus on inference, which often corresponds, intuitively, to “guilt by association” scenarios. For example, if a person is a drug-abuser, probably its friends are so, too; if a node in a social network is of male gender, his dates are probably females. We show how to do inference on such huge graphs through our prop

Computer Vision and Pattern RecognitionComputer Science
13
Article|62 citations·2013
Big graph mining
U Kang, Christos Faloutsos
FWCI 11.0ACM SIGKDD Explorations Newsletter

How do we find patterns and anomalies in very large graphs with billions of nodes and edges? How to mine such big graphs efficiently? Big graphs are everywhere, ranging from social networks and mobile call networks to biological networks and the World Wide Web. Mining big graphs leads to many interesting applications including cyber security, fraud detection, Web search, recommendation, and many more. In this paper we describe Pegasus, a big graph mining system built on top of MapReduce, a moder

Computer Vision and Pattern RecognitionComputer Science
14
Article|57 citations·2010
Radius Plots for Mining Tera-byte Scale Graphs: Algorithms, Patterns, and Observations
U Kang, Charalampos E. Tsourakakis, Ana Paula Appel, Christos Faloutsos, Jure Leskovec
FWCI 9.0

Given large, multi-million node graphs (e.g., FaceBook, web-crawls, etc.), how do they evolve over time? How are they connected? What are the central nodes and the outliers of the graphs? We show that the Radius Plot (pdf of node radii) can answer these questions. However, computing the Radius Plot is prohibitively expensive for graphs reaching the planetary scale. There are two major contributions in this paper: (a) We propose HADI (HAdoop DIameter and radii estimator), a carefully designed and

Statistical and Nonlinear PhysicsPhysics and Astronomy
15
Article|57 citations·2013
HEigen: Spectral Analysis for Billion-Scale Graphs
U Kang, Brendan Meeder, Evangelos E. Papalexakis, Christos Faloutsos
SJR Q1FWCI 8.2IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering

Given a graph with billions of nodes and edges, how can we find patterns and anomalies? Are there nodes that participate in too many or too few triangles? Are there close-knit near-cliques? These questions are expensive to answer unless we have the first several eigenvalues and eigenvectors of the graph adjacency matrix. However, eigensolvers suffer from subtle problems (e.g., convergence) for large sparse matrices, let alone for billion-scale ones. We address this problem with the proposed HEIG

Statistical and Nonlinear PhysicsPhysics and Astronomy

Research Areas

Artificial IntelligenceComputer Vision and Pattern RecognitionStatistical and Nonlinear PhysicsInformation SystemsComputational MathematicsHealth Information Management

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