Can we forecast future connections in a social network? Can we predict who will start using a given hashtag in Twitter, leveraging contextual information such as who follows or retweets whom to improve our predictions? In this paper we present an abridged report of TensorCast, an award winning method for forecasting time-evolving networks, that uses coupled tensors to incorporate multiple information sources. TensorCast is scalable (linearithmic on the number of connections), effective (more precise than competing methods) and general (applicable to any data source representable by a tensor). We also showcase our method when applied to forecast two large scale heterogeneous real world temporal networks, namely Twitter and DBLP.

Given an heterogeneous social network, can we forecast its future? Can we predict who will start using a given hashtag on twitter? Can we leverage side information, such as who retweets or follows whom, to improve our membership forecasts? We present TensorCast, a novel method that forecasts time-evolving networks more accurately than current state of the art methods by incorporating multiple data sources in coupled tensors. TensorCast is (a) scalable, being linearithmic on the number of connections; (b) effective, achieving over 20% improved precision on top-1000 forecasts of community members; (c) general, being applicable to data sources with different structure. We run our method on multiple real-world networks, including DBLP and a Twitter temporal network with over 310 million non-zeros, where we predict the evolution of the activity of the use of political hashtags.

Bank transaction fraud results in over $13B annual losses for banks, merchants, and card holders worldwide. Much of this fraud starts with a Point-of-Compromise (a data breach or a ”skimming” operation) where credit and debit card digital information is stolen, resold, and later used to perform fraud. We introduce this problem and present an automatic Points-of-Compromise (POC) detection procedure. BreachRadar is a distributed alternating algorithm that assigns a probability of being compromised to the different possible locations. We implement this method using Apache Spark and show its linear scalability in the number of machines and transactions. BreachRadar is applied to two datasets with billions of real transaction records and fraud labels where we provide multiple examples of real Points-of-Compromise we are able to detect. We further show the effectiveness of our method when injecting Points-of-Compromise in one of these datasets, simultaneously achieving over 90% precision and recall when only 10% of the cards have been victims of fraud.

The execution of an agent's complex activities, comprising sequences of simpler actions, sometimes leads to the clash of conflicting functions that must be optimized. These functions represent satisfaction, short-term as well as long-term objectives, costs and individual preferences. The way that these functions are weighted is usually unknown even to the decision maker. But if we were able to understand the individual motivations and compare such motivations among individuals, then we would be able to actively change the environment so as to increase satisfaction and/or improve performance. In this work, we approach the problem of providing highlevel and intelligible descriptions of the motivations of an agent, based on observations of such an agent during the fulfillment of a series of complex activities (called sequential decisions in our work). A novel algorithm for the analysis of observational records is proposed. We also present a methodology that allows researchers to converge towards a summary description of an agent's behaviors, through the minimization of an error measure between the current description and the observed behaviors. This work was validated using not only a synthetic dataset representing the motivations of a passenger in a public transportation network, but also real taxi drivers' behaviors from their trips in an urban network. Our results show that our method is not only useful, but also performs much better than the previous methods, in terms of accuracy, efficiency and scalability.