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Hossam Sharara

  • Position: Assistant Professor
  • Department: Department of Computer Science and Engineering
  • Email: [email protected]
Brief Biography

As an Assistant Professor, Hossam Sharara joined the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at The American University in Cairo (AUC) in July 2018. He got his BSc and MSc degrees in computer science and engineering from Alexandria University, Egypt, in 2004 and 2007, respectively. He then joined the Department of Computer Science at the University of Maryland, College Park, USA as a research assistant in the year 2007, from where he obtained another MSc degree in 2010 and received his PhD degree in relational machine learning and data ,ining in 2012 under the supervision of Prof. Lise Getoor. His PhD research was partially supported by the Dean's fellowship award, which he was granted from the University of Maryland, College Park, in 2010.  From 2012 to 2018, Sharara worked as a senior engineer/research scientist at Google (2012 - 2016), and Facebook (2016 - 2018). He returned to Egypt in early 2018, joining Uber Egypt as a Senior Manager of Business and Data Analytics. 

Sharara has authored and co-authored numerous publications that appeared in top-tier, peer-reviewed conferences and journal proceedings, including ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM), International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI), Journal of Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining, and others. In addition, he co-authored a book chapter in "Link Mining: Models, Algorithms and Applications" by Philip S. Yu, Christos Faloutsos, and Jiawei Han and an article in the Encyclopedia of Machine Learning. He also served on the program committee at several data mining conferences, as a member of the NSF review panel on Graph Mining in 2013 and on the academic review panel at Google. 

Sharara's research interests span the area of data mining, machine learning, social network analysis and online marketing. A common thread in his research understands the different types of interactions that occur within social media and their effects on users’ behavior. His main research focuses on reasoning in dynamic, multi-modal, multi-relational network settings, where multiple entity types exist (such as people, social groups, organizations, locations, etc.) and different types of relationships (such as friendship, membership, affiliation, etc.). His long-term research agenda is analyzing the different aspects related to information networks (such as group formation, network clustering, information diffusion, adoption, and so on), creating explanatory and predictive models of the interactions that occur in complex network settings, and investigating the implications of these studies on applications in different domains. 

    Research Interest
    • Social Network Analysis
    • Relational Data Mining
    • Machine Learning
    • Viral Marketing
    • Technology Adoption
    • Information Diffusion
    • Hossam Sharara, Lisa Singh, Lise Getoor, and Janet Mann, Finding Prominent Actors in Dynamic Affiliation Networks. Human Journal, vol. 1, pp 1-14, 2013
    • Hossam Sharara, Lisa Singh, Lise Getoor, and Janet Mann, Stability vs. Diversity: Understanding the Dynamics of Actors in Time-varying Affiliation Networks. In Proceedings of ASE International Conference on Social Informatics, Washington, DC, 2012 (Best Paper Award)
    • Akshay Patil, Juan Liu, Bob Price, Hossam Sharara, and Oliver Brdiczka, Modeling Destructive Group Dynamics in On-line Gaming Communities. In Proceedings of the sixth International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM), Dublin, Ireland, 2012
    • Hossam Sharara, Awalin Sopan, Galileo Namata, Lise Getoor and Lisa Singh, G-Pare: A Visual Analytic Tool for Comparative Analysis of Uncertain Graphs. In Proceedings of IEEE Conference on Visual Analytics Science and Technology (VAST), Providence, RI, 2011
    • Hossam Sharara, William Rand, and Lise Getoor, Differential Adaptive Diffusion: Understanding Diversity and Learning whom to Trust in Viral Marketing. In Proceedings of the fifth International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM), Barcelona, Spain, 2011
    • Hossam Sharara, Lise Getoor, and Myra Norton, Active Surveying: A Probabilistic Approach for Identifying Key Opinion Leaders. In Proceedings of the 22nd International Joint Conference On Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI), Barcelona, Spain, 2011
    • Hossam Sharara, Cedric Westphal, Svetlana Radosvac, and Ulas Kozat, Utilizing Social Influence in Content Distribution Networks. In Proceedings of IEEE International Conference on Communication (ICC), Kyoto, Japan, 2011 (Best Paper Award)
    • Hossam Sharara, Daniel Halgin, Lise Getoor, and Steve Borgatti, Multi-dimensional Trajectory Analysis for Career Histories. International Sunbelt Social Networks Conference XXXI, St. Pete Beach, FL, 2011
    • Hossam Sharara, Lisa Singh, Lise Getoor, and Janet Mann, Understanding Actor Loyalty to Event-Based Groups in Affiliation Networks. Journal of Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining, 2010
    • Galileo Namata, Hossam Sharara, and Lise Getoor, A Survey of Link Mining Tasks for Analyzing Noisy and Incomplete Networks. Book chapter in Link Mining: Models, Algorithms and Applications, Philip S. Yu, Christos Faloutsos, and Jiawei Han (Editors), 2010
    • Hossam Sharara and Lise Getoor, Group Detection. Article in Encyclopedia of Machine Learning, Claude Sammut and Geoffrey I. Webb (Editors), 2010
    • Hossam Sharara, Myra Norton, and Lise Getoor, Active Surveying for Leadership Identification. The International Sunbelt Social Networks Conference XXX, Trento, Italy, 2010
    • Elena Zheleva, Hossam Sharara, and Lise Getoor, Co-evolution of social and affiliation networks. In Proceedings of the 15th ACM SIGKDD Conference On Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD), Paris, France, 2009
    • Hossam Sharara, Lisa Singh, Lise Getoor, and Janet Mann, The Dynamics of Actor Loyalty to Groups in Affiliation Networks. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Advances in Social Network Analysis and Mining (ASONAM), Athens, Greece, 2009
    • PhD in Computer Science, University of Maryland, College Park, USA - May 2012
    • MSc in Computer Science, University of Maryland, College Park, USA - May 2010
    • MSc in Computer Science, Alexandria University, Egypt - June 2007
    • BSc in Computer Science, Alexandria University, Egypt - June 2004