Contact
- neil at nshah dot net [personal]
- nshah at snap dot com [work]
Location
- 2025 1st Avenue
- Seattle, WA 98121
About Me
I am a Research Scientist at Snap Research. My work spans the data mining, machine learning, and computational social science domains, and especially focuses on graph-based techniques for user behavior and misbehavior modeling on social platforms.
Before I joined Snap, I defended my PhD thesis in the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon University, where I worked on discovering and modeling various types of abusive online behaviors as anomaly detection problems in large networks. I was very fortunate to have been advised by Christos Faloutsos.
Prior to this, I received my B.S. in Computer Science from the Department of Computer Science at North Carolina State University. There, I worked with Nagiza Samatova on reduction, indexing and storage systems for large-scale scientific data.
If you would like to learn more about my work, take a look at my publications and CV.
I'm hiring for a FTE Research Engineer role in graph ML!
Please apply here,
and e-mail me afterwards.
A note to prospective interns:
Please apply on the Snap Research website here,
and e-mail me afterwards.
Recent News
- March 2022: Honored to receive the Outstanding Service Award at WSDM 2022!
- January 2022: Our paper Sunshine with a Chance of Smiles: How does Weather Impact Sentiment on Social Media? was accepted to ICWSM 2022 -- see you over Zoom!
- February 2022: Excited to organize WSDM Cup 2022 on Feb 25th, and see theory meet practice across tasks like user retention prediction, temporal link prediction and cross-market recommendation!
- February 2022: Excited to give a keynote at the WSDM Machine Learning on Graphs (MLoG) Workshop and talk about some of our recent advances in scaling up graph neural network training and inference at Snap!
- January 2022: Our paper Graph-less Neural Networks: Teaching Old MLPs new Tricks via Distillation was accepted to ICLR 2022 -- see you over Zoom!
- January 2022: Our paper Graph Condensation for Graph Neural Networks was accepted to ICLR 2022 -- see you over Zoom!
- January 2022: Our paper From Stars to Subgraphs: Uplifting any GNN with Local Structure Awareness was accepted to ICLR 2022 -- see you over Zoom!
- January 2022: Our paper Is Homophily a Necessity for Graph Neural Networks? was accepted to ICLR 2022 -- see you over Zoom!
- January 2022: Our paper Automated Self-Supervised Learning for Graphs was accepted to ICLR 2022 -- see you over Zoom!
- October 2021: Excited to talk about some of our recent advances in scarce-label graph learning at the IIIT Delhi Laboratory for Computational Social Systems Seminar Series as an invited speaker.
- October 2021: Our paper Ranking Friend Stories on Social Platforms with Edge-Contextual Local Graph Convolutions was accepted to WSDM 2022 -- see you in Phoenix!
- October 2021: Our paper Attributed Graph Modeling with Vertex Replacement Grammars was accepted to WSDM 2022 -- see you in Phoenix!
- October 2021: Our paper Finding a Concise, Precise and Exhaustive Set of Near Bi-Cliques in Dynamic Graphs was accepted to WSDM 2022 -- see you in Phoenix!
- August 2021: Our paper Action Sequence Augmentation for Early Graph-based Anomaly Detection was accepted to CIKM 2021 -- see you over Zoom!
- August 2021: Our paper A Unified View on Graph Neural Networks as Graph Signal Denoising was accepted to CIKM 2021 -- see you over Zoom!
- August 2021: Our paper Niche Detection in User Content Consumption Data was accepted to CIKM 2021 -- see you over Zoom!
- August 2021: Our paper A Synergistic Approach for Graph Anomaly Detection with Pattern Mining and Feature Learning was accepted to TNNLS 2021!
- June 2021: I will be co-organizing WSDM Cup at WSDM 2022 -- the call for task proposals is out; looking forward to your amazing submissions!
- April 2021: Our paper FairOD: Fairness-aware Outlier Detection was accepted to AIES 2021 -- see you over Zoom!
- March 2021: I will be co-organizing the Misinformation and Misbehavior (MIS2) workshop at KDD 2021 this year -- see you over Zoom!
- March 2021: I will be a keynote speaker at the ML in Finance (MLF) workshop at KDD 2021 this year -- see you over Zoom!
- March 2021: Our paper Online Communication Shifts in the Midst of the Covid-19 Pandemic: A Case Study on Snapchat was accepted to ICWSM 2021 -- see you (hopefully) in Atlanta, GA!
- March 2021: Our paper CEAM: The Effectiveness of Cyclic and Ephemeral Attention Models of User Behavior on Social Platforms was accepted to ICWSM 2021 -- see you (hopefully) in Atlanta, GA!
- December 2020: Our paper AdverTiming Matters: Examining User Ad Consumption for Effective Ad Allocations on Social Media was accepted to CHI 2021 -- see you over Zoom!
- December 2020: Our exciting new work FairOD: Fairness-aware Outlier Detection is now available as a preprint!
- December 2020: Our paper Data Augmentation for Graph Neural Networks was accepted to AAAI 2021 -- see you over Zoom!
- October 2020: Our exciting new work A Unified View on Graph Neural Networks as Graph Signal Denoising is now available as as preprint!
- September 2020: Our paper The Devil is in the Details: Evaluating Limitations of Transformer-based Methods for Granular Tasks was accepted to COLING 2020 -- see you over Zoom!
- July 2020: Our paper Social Factors in Closed-Network Content Consumption was accepted to CIKM 2020 -- see you over Zoom!
- July 2020: Our paper Identifying Misinformation from Website Screenshots was accepted to ICWSM 2021 -- see you (hopefully) in Venice!
- July 2020: Our paper Scale-Free, Attributed and Class-Assortative Graph Generation to Facilitate Introspection of Graph Neural Networks was accepted to KDD MLG 2020 -- see you over Zoom!
- June 2020: Our exciting new work Data Augmentation for Graph Neural Networks is now available as a preprint!
- June 2020: Our paper Semi-Supervised Multi-aspect Misinformation Detection with Hierarchical Joint Decomposition was accepted to ECML-PKDD 2020 -- see you over Zoom!
- May 2020: Our paper Knowing your FATE: Friendship, Action and Temporal Explanations for User Engagement Prediction on Social Apps was accepted to KDD 2020 -- see you over Zoom!
- February 2020: I will be chairing the CyberSafety workshop at TheWebConf 2020 -- see you over Zoom!
- October 2019: I will be a keynote speaker and panelist at the Doctoral Consortium at ICDM 2019 -- see you in Beijing!
- July 2019: I will be giving a keynote talk on Outlier Detection for Mining Social Misbehavior at the Learning and Mining for Cybersecurity (LEMINCS) workshop at KDD 2019 -- see you in Anchorage!
- July 2019: Our paper SliceNDice: Mining Suspicious Multi-attribute Entity Groups with Multi-view Graphs was accepted to DSAA 2019 -- see you in Washington, DC!
- July 2019: Our paper FARE: Schema-Agnostic Anomaly Detection in Social Event Logs was accepted to DSAA 2019 -- see you in Washington, DC!
- July 2019: I will be chairing WSDM Cup at WSDM 2020 -- see you in Houston!
- June 2019: Our paper Characterizing and Detecting Livestreaming Chatbots was accepted to ASONAM 2019 -- see you in Vancouver!
- April 2019: Our paper Modeling Dwell Time Engagement on Visual Multimedia was accepted to KDD 2019 -- see you in Anchorage!
- March 2019: Our CHI 2019 paper on Impact
of Contextual Factors on Public Snapchat Sharing
won a Best Paper Honorable Mention award! - December 2018: Our paper Impact of
Contextual Factors on Public Snapchat Sharing
was accepted to CHI 2019 -- see you in Glasgow! - December 2018: Our work on false information with Vagelis Papalexakis was featured on the NVIDIA AI Podcast!
- November 2018: I will be chairing the CyberSafety workshop at WWW 2019 -- see you in San Francisco!
- October 2018: I will be chairing the ASONAM 2019 Industrial Track -- see you in Vancouver!
- September 2018: I will be giving a keynote talk on Lessons I learned during my PhD at the PhD Forum at ECML-PKDD 2019 -- see you in Dublin!
- August 2018: Our work on false information with Vagelis Papalexakis is featured in a Digital Trends article.
- July 2018: I will be giving a keynote talk on Outlier Detection for Mining Social Misbehavior at the Outlier Detection De-constructed (ODD) workshop at KDD 2018 -- see you in London!
- June 2018: Our paper Did We Get It Right? Predicting Query Performance in E-commerce Search was accepted to the eCom Workshop at SIGIR 2018!
- June 2018: Our paper Beyond Outlier Detection: LookOut for Pictorial Explanation was accepted to ECML-PKDD 2018 -- see you in Dublin!
- June 2018: Our paper Semi-supervised Content-based Detection of Misinformation via Tensor Embeddings was accepted to ASONAM 2018 -- see you in Barcelona!
- April 2018: Srijan Kumar and I published a comprehensive survey on characterizing and detecting false information, False Information on Web and Social Media: A Survey. Check it out!
- March 2018: I will be giving a keynote talk on Anomaly Detection on Large Social Graphs at the CyberSafety workshop at WWW 2018 -- see you in Lyon!
- January 2018: Our paper Reducing Large Graphs to Small Supergraphs: A Unified Approach will be published in SNAM 2018!
- December 2017: I have joined Snap Inc as a Research Scientist in Los Angeles, CA!
- October 2017: I successfully defended my thesis, Anomaly Detection in Large Social Graphs, from Carnegie Mellon University's School of Computer Science, advised by Christos Faloutsos.