Curriculum Vitae (Condensed Version) - September 2007

Full CV (pdf) also available here

Publications

web: www.cs.bc.edu/~alvarez
e-mail: alvarez@cs.bc.edu

Current Position:

Associate Professor

Computer Science Department

Boston College

Chestnut Hill, MA 02467

• Metrics for knowledge combination and data analysis
• Modeling and management of uncertainty
• Self-organizing neural networks, pattern recognition
• Optimal control, optimization
• Interface dynamics, nonlinear partial differential equations

• Associate Professor, Computer Science Department,
  Boston College, Chestnut Hill, MA 02467, starting Sept. 2007

• Assistant Professor, Computer Science Department,
  Boston College, Chestnut Hill, MA 02467, 2001-2007

• Visiting Assistant Professor, Computer Science Department,
  Wellesley College, Wellesley, MA 02481, 2000-2001

• Visiting Assistant Professor, Computer Science Department,
  Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Worcester, MA 01609, 1998-2000

• Assistant Professor, Mathematics and Computer Science Department,
  Eastern Connecticut State University, Willimantic, CT 06226, starting Aug. 1997 (resigned 1998)

• Visiting faculty member and postdoctoral research associate,
  Department of Mathematical Sciences and Center for Nonlinear Analysis,
  Carnegie Mellon University, 1996-1997

• Graduate Research Assistant, Department of Computer Science,
  University of Maryland at College Park, 1995-1996
  

• Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics, University of Maryland, College Park, 1996
• M.S. in Mathematics, Universidad de los Andes, 1989
• B.S. in Electrical and Computer Engineering, Universidad Javeriana, 1985

Conference and workshop organization

• Program committee member, Seventeenth International Conference on Applications of Declarative Programming & Knowledge Management (INAdP2007), Würzburg, Germany, Oct. 2007

• Program committee member, Seventh IEEE International Conference on Bioinformatics and Bioengineering (BIBE 2007), Boston, MA, USA, Oct. 2007

• Program committee member, 16th International Conference on Applications of Declarative Programming and Knowledge Management (INAP2004), Waseda University, Fukuoka, Japan, Oct. 2005

• Co-Chair, Data Mining session at INAdP 2004, Berlin, Germany, March 2004

• Program committee member, 15th International Conference on Applications of Declarative Programming and Knowledge Management (INAP2004), Berlin/Potsdam, Germany, March 2004

• Co-Chair, Rule-Based Data Mining 2001 Workshop (RBDM2001), Tokyo, Japan

• Program committee member, 14th International Conference on Applications of Prolog (INAP2001), Tokyo, Japan, Oct. 2001

Participant in recent professional conferences

• Eighteenth IEEE International Symposium on Computer-Based Medical Systems (CBMS-2005)
  Dublin, Ireland, June 2005

• Tenth International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD-2004)
  Seattle, WA, USA, Aug. 2004

• Ninth International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD-2003)
  Washington, DC, USA, Aug. 2003

• Eighth International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD-2002)
  Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, Aug. 2002

• International Conference on Applications of Prolog (INAP-2000)
  Tokyo, Japan, Oct. 2000

• Sixth International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD-2000)
  Boston, MA, Aug. 2000

• 17th National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-2000)
  Austin, TX, Aug. 2000

• Sixth International Symposium on Artificial Intelligence and Mathematics
  Ft. Lauderdale, FL, Jan. 2000

• Workshop on Soft Computing,
  Marianska u Jachymova, Czech Republic, November 1999

• CAIMS-99, Quebec City, Canada, June 1999

• AAAI-98, Madison, WI, July 1998

• Course on Uncertain Reasoning, UAI-98, Madison, WI, July 1998

Selected presentations in university seminars

• Babson College.
  "Data Mining in Science and Business"
  February 2001.

• Wellesley College.
  "Computation in Adaptive Systems"
  Computer Science Seminar, March 2000.

• Worcester Polytechnic Institute.
  "Examples of Probabilistic Learning"
  Artificial Intelligence Seminar, April 1999.

• Brown University.
  "Motion by Surface Diffusion"
  Lefschetz Center for Dynamical Systems Seminar, March 1997.

• University of Toronto.
  "Analyticity for Interface Motion Driven by Curvature and Diffusion"
  Analysis and Partial Differential Equations Seminar, November 1996.

• University of Maryland at College Park.
  "Metrics for the Study of Self-Organizing Networks"
  Neural Modeling Seminar, February 1996.

Supervision of student research

Graduate students

1. Shivin Misra, ``Uncovering Structure in Human Sleep Data'', Master's Thesis, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, starting Fall 2006 (co-advised with Carolina Ruiz)

2. Stuart Floyd, ``Machine Learning Models in Cancer Treatment'', Master's Thesis, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, 2006-2007 (co-advised with Carolina Ruiz)

3. John Hayward, ``Mining Oncology Data: Knowledge Discovery in Clinical Performance of Cancer Patients'', Master's Thesis, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, 2005-2006 (co-advised with Carolina Ruiz)

4. Parameshvyas Laxminarayan, ``Mining Patterns over Physiological Sleep Data'', Master's Thesis, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, 2002-2003 (co-advised with Carolina Ruiz)

5. Wendy Kogel, ``Faster Training of Neural Networks for Recommender Systems'', Master's Thesis, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, 2000-2001 (co-advised with Carolina Ruiz)

6. Weiyang Lin, ``Association Rule Mining for Collaborative Recommender Systems'', Master's Thesis, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, 1999-2000 (co-advised with Carolina Ruiz)

7. Jim Kilian, ``Statistical Learning Theory and Support Vector Machines'', Ph.D. Independent Study Project, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, 1999 (co-advised with Soraya Rana and Mark Stevens)

Undergraduate students

1. Dan Scali, ``Evolutionary Strategies for the Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma'', Honors Thesis, Boston College, 2006

2. Robert Russo, ``Bayesian Networks for Hybrid Recommender Systems'', Honors Thesis, Boston College, 2006

3. Piotr Mardziel, ``Extensions to 2-D Dynamic Warping'', Major Qualifying Project (MQP), Worcester Polytechnic Institute; Winner, Provost's MQP Award for Computer Science, 2006 (co-advised with Carolina Ruiz)

4. Michael Ahern, ``Co-evolving Quidditch Players using Genetic Programming'', Honors Thesis, Boston College, 2005

5. Michael S. McCowan and James I. Martineau, ``Spam Filtering using Bayesian Networks'', Major Qualifying Project (MQP), Worcester Polytechnic Institute, 2005 (co-advised with Carolina Ruiz)

6. Takeshi Kawato, ``Multi-Expert Neural Networks for Recommendation'', Major Qualifying Project (MQP), Worcester Polytechnic Institute, 2003 (co-advised with Carolina Ruiz)

7. Tara Halwes, ``Data Mining for Sequence Data'', Major Qualifying Project (MQP), Worcester Polytechnic Institute; Winner, Provost's MQP Award for Computer Science, 2001 (co-advised with Carolina Ruiz)

8. Matthew J. Streeter, ``N²VIS: An Interactive Visualization Tool for Neural Networks'', Major Qualifying Project (MQP), Worcester Polytechnic Institute; Winner, Provost's MQP Award for Computer Science, 2000 (co-advised with Matthew Ward)

9. Matthew L. Berube, ``TinFOIL: A System for Learning Rules from Examples'', Major Qualifying Project (MQP), Worcester Polytechnic Institute; Winner, Provost's MQP Award for Computer Science, 1999 (co-advised with Carolina Ruiz)

10. Amy H. Kao and Dana N. Rock, ``Collaborative and Content-Based Filtering using Neural Networks'', Major Qualifying Project (MQP), Worcester Polytechnic Institute, 1999 (co-advised with Carolina Ruiz)

11. Anna Novikov, ``Combination of Relevance Rankings for Web Metasearch'', Major Qualifying Project (MQP), Worcester Polytechnic Institute, 1998 (co-advised with Carolina Ruiz)

• Referee for journal articles
  • Knowledge Engineering Review
  • IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics
  • Artificial Intelligence for Engineering Design, Analysis and Manufacturing
  • Journal of Differential Equations
• Referee for conference articles
  • Seventh IEEE International Conference on Bioinformatics and Bioengineering (BIBE 2007), Boston, MA, USA, Oct. 2007
  • Seventeenth International Conference on Applications of Declarative Programming & Knowledge Management (INAdP2007), Würzburg, Germany, Oct. 2007
  • Latin American Theoretical Informatics Symposium (LATIN 2006)
  • Sixteenth International Conference on Applications of Declarative Programming and Knowledge Management (INAP 2005)
  • Fifteenth International Conference on Applications of Declarative Programming and Knowledge Management (INAP 2004)
  • Fourteenth International Conference on Applications of Prolog (INAP 2001)
  • Ninth International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM 2000)
• Campus and departmental service
  • Member, Bioinformatics Faculty Search Committee, Boston College, Fall 2004 - Spring 2005
  • Member, Carroll School of Management Education Policy Committee, Boston College, Spring 2004
  • Member, Bioinformatics Curriculum Committee, Boston College, starting 2003
  • Faculty Advisor, Short Courses in Computer Science, Boston College, 2002-2003
  • Organizer, Computer Science Colloquium, Wellesley College, 2000-2001

• Provost's MQP Award for Computer Science (Advisor), Worcester Polytechnic Institute, 2006
• Faculty Fellowship, Boston College, Fall 2003
• Provost's MQP Award for Computer Science (Advisor), Worcester Polytechnic Institute, 2001
• ``Computational Algorithms for Analysis of Genetic Data'', $19,600 (with J. Krushkal, C. Ruiz, E. Ryder, M. Stevens), Worcester Polytechnic Institute Research Development Council, Summer 2000
• Provost's MQP Award for Computer Science (Advisor), Worcester Polytechnic Institute, 2000
• Provost's MQP Award for Computer Science (Advisor), Worcester Polytechnic Institute, 1999
• Graduate School Fellowship (merit-based), University of Maryland, 1989-1991
• Mathematics Department Fellowship (merit-based), University of Maryland, 1989-1992

Articles in refereed journals

1. P. Laxminarayan*, S.A. Alvarez, C. Ruiz, and M. Moonis.
   "Mining Statistically Significant Associations for Exploratory Analysis of Human Sleep Data", IEEE Transactions on Information Technology in Biomedicine, vol 10, no 3, July 2006, 440-450

2. S.A. Alvarez, C. Ruiz, T. Kawato*, W. Kogel*.
   "Neural Expert Networks for Faster Combined Collaborative and Content-Based Recommendation", Journal of Computational Methods in Sciences and Engineering, to appear

3. S.A. Alvarez. "A Theory of Frame Transformations for Belief Combination", Annals of Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence, 40 (3/4), pp 187-213, March 2004

4. W.-Y. Lin*, S.A. Alvarez, C. Ruiz. "Efficient Adaptive-Support Association Rule Mining for Recommender Systems", Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery, Vol. 6, No. 1, pp. 83-105, Jan. 2002

5. C. Shoemaker*, M. Pungliya*, M. Sao Pedro*, C. Ruiz, S.A. Alvarez, M. Ward, E. Ryder, J. Krushkal. "Computational methods for single point and multipoint analysis of genetic variants associated with a simulated complex disorder in a general population". Genetic Epidemiology, Nov. 2001

6. T.E. Carter, S.A. Alvarez. ``Quadratic Computation of Optimal Four-Impulse Rendezvous Near a Circular Orbit'', Journal of Guidance, Control, and Dynamics, vol. 23, no. 1, 109-117, Jan.-Feb. 2000

7. S.A. Alvarez, S.L. Levitan, J.A. Reggia. ``Metrics for Cortical Map Organization and Asymmetry'' The Bulletin of Mathematical Biology, vol. 60 (1998), 27-47

8. S.A. Alvarez, C. Liu. "Motion of a Closed Curve by Minus the Surface Laplacian of Curvature", Differential and Integral Equations, vol. 13, no. 10-12, Oct.-Dec. 2000, pp. 1583-1594; also see Research Report No. 97-NA-009, Center for Nonlinear Analysis, Carnegie Mellon University, Aug. 1997

9. S.A. Alvarez. ``Homothetic Invariance of the Space L⁰(μ)'', Journal of Mathematical Analysis and Applications, Vol. 179, no. 1, Oct. 1993, 260-274

10. S.A. Alvarez. ``L^p Arithmetic'', The American Mathematical Monthly, vol. 99, no. 8, Aug.-Sept. 1992, 656-662

11. S.A. Alvarez. ``Lattices Generated by Collections of L^p Spaces'', Rev. Col. Mat., vol. XXII, 1988

12. S.A. Alvarez, D. Noreña, E. Ramos. ``Automated Recognition of Handprinted Alphanumeric Characters'', Sistemas, No. 23, Apr.-Jun. 1985

Conference and workshop articles

1. "Improved Survival Prediction for Pancreatic Cancer using Machine Learning and Regression" (with S. Floyd*, C. Ruiz, J. Hayward*, M. Sullivan, J. Tseng, and G. Whalen), extended abstract accepted for presentation at the Society for the Surgery of the Alimentary Tract 48th Annual Meeting (SSAT 2007), in conjunction with Digestive Disease Week, Washington DC, USA, May 19-23, 2007

2. "Survival of Pancreatic Cancer Patients Predicted using Machine Learning Techniques" (with J. Hayward*, C. Ruiz, J. Tseng, M. Sullivan, and G. Whalen), extended abstract accepted for presentation at the Society of Surgical Oncology 60th Annual Cancer Symposium, Washington, DC, USA, March 15-18, 2007

3. "Mining Associations over Human Sleep Time Series" (with P. Laxminarayan*, C. Ruiz, and M. Moonis), Proc. 18th IEEE International Symposium on Computer-Based Medical Systems (CBMS 2005), Dublin, Ireland, June 2005

4. "Mining over Loosely Coupled Data Sources using Neural Experts" (with T. Kawato* and C. Ruiz), Fourth International Workshop on Multimedia Data Mining (MDM/KDD 2003), in conjunction with the Ninth ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD2003), Washington, DC, Aug. 2003

5. ``N²VIS -- An Interactive Visualization Tool for Neural Networks'' (with M. Streeter* and M. Ward), Visual Data Exploration and Analysis VIII, Proc. SPIE Vol. 4302, San Jose, CA, Jan. 2001

6. ``Computational Population-Based Techniques in Identifying Genetic Variants Associated with Simulated Complex Disorder in a General Population'' (with M. Sao Pedro*, C. Shoemaker*, M. Pungliya*, C. Ruiz, M. Ward, M. Stevens, E.F. Ryder, and J. Krushkal), GAW-12 (2000 Genetic Analysis Workshop), Southwest Foundation for Biomedical Research, San Antonio, TX, Oct. 2000

7. ``Prescription vs. Description: Two Data Mining Approaches to the Analysis of Genetic Data'' (with C. Shoemaker*, M. Sao Pedro*, and C. Ruiz), GAW-12 (2000 Genetic Analysis Workshop), Southwest Foundation for Biomedical Research, San Antonio, TX, Oct. 2000

8. ``Collaborative Recommendation via Adaptive Association Rule Mining'' (with W.-Y. Lin* and C. Ruiz), WebKDD-2000 (KDD-2000 Workshop on Web Mining), Boston, MA, Aug. 2000

9. ``Web Metasearch as Belief Aggregation'', AAAI-2000 Workshop on Artificial Intelligence for Web Search, Austin, TX, July 2000

10. ``Belief Combination by Means of Frame Transformations'', Sixth International Symposium on Artificial Intelligence and Mathematics, Ft. Lauderdale, FL, Jan. 2000

11. ``A Geometric Theory of Knowledge Aggregation'', Workshop on Soft Computing, Marianska u Jachymova, Czech Republic, Nov. 1999

12. ``Four-Impulse Rendezvous Near Circular Orbit'' (with T.E. Carter), AIAA/AAS Astrodynamics Specialist Conference, Boston, MA, Aug. 1998

13. ``Motion of a Closed Curve by Surface Diffusion'' (with C. Liu), Session on Phase Transitions in Materials Science, AMS Southeastern Section meeting, Atlanta, GA, Oct. 1997

14. ``A New Framework for Geometric Interface Motion'' (with R.L. Pego), AMS Eastern Section meeting, College Park, MD, Apr. 1997

Book chapters

• S.A. Alvarez, C. Ruiz, and T. Kawato*.
  "More Efficient Mining over Heterogeneous Data using Neural Expert Networks", in Multimedia Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery (V.A. Petrushin and L. Khan, eds.), Springer, 2007; ISBN: 978-1-84628-436-6`

• S.A. Alvarez, C. Ruiz, and V. Dignum.
  "Data Mining and Web Knowledge Management", in Web Knowledge Management and Decision Support (14th International Conference on Applications of Prolog, INAP 2001, Tokyo, Japan, October 20-22, 2001, Revised Papers), Bartenstein, O., Geske, U., Hannebauer, M., Yoshie, O., (Eds.), Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Volume 2543, Springer, 2003

Technical reports

1. Alvarez, S.A.,
   "Chi-Squared Computation for Association Rules: Preliminary Results", Technical Report BC-CS-2003-01, Computer Science Department, Boston College, July 2003

2. Alvarez, S.A.,
   "An Exact Analytical Relation among Recall, Precision, and Classification Accuracy in Information Retrieval", Technical Report BC-CS-02-01, Computer Science Department, Boston College, June 2002

3. ``A New Adaptive-Support Algorithm for Asociation Rule Mining'' (with W.-Y. Lin* and C. Ruiz), Technical Report WPI-CS-TR-00-13, Department of Computer Science, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, May 2000

4. ``NNVIS: An Interactive Visualization Tool for Neural Networks'' (with M. Streeter* and M. Ward), Technical Report WPI-CS-TR-00-11, Department of Computer Science, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, March 2000

5. ``A Transformation-Based Combination Framework for Approximate Reasoning'', Technical Report WPI-CS-TR-98-22, Department of Computer Science, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Nov. 1998

6. ``Rational Comparison of Probabilities via a Blow-Up Conjugacy'', Research Report 97-NA-010, Center for Nonlinear Analysis, Carnegie Mellon University, Aug. 1997

7. ``Measuring Organization and Asymmetry in Bihemispheric Topographic Map Formation'' (with S. Levitan and J. A. Reggia), Technical Report UMCP-CSD:CS-TR-3668, Department of Computer Science, University of Maryland, College Park, Sept. 1996

8. ``Time-Optimal Control of Wheeled Mobile Robots'' (with J. H. Maddocks), Technical Report TR 91-18, Department of Mathematics, University of Maryland, College Park, May 1991

• Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
• ACM Special Interest Group on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (SIGKDD)