...is a Ph.D. candidate in the Dept. of Computer and Information Science at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, PA. I received my M.S.E. from Penn in 2010 and did my undergraduate study at Washington & Lee University in Lexington, VA where I received my B.Sc. in Computer Science in 2007.
Currently, I work on the Quantitative Trust Management (QTM) project under the supervision of Insup Lee and Oleg Sokolsky.
Generally, my research leverages machine-learning and behavioral modeling for anti-abuse (e.g., vandalism, spam, copyright violations) analysis and detection in Web 2.0 information systems. Particular emphasis has been given to those environments with user-generated and collaborative semantics (e.g., wikis). My approaches embrace trust/reputation management, metadata-driven feature selection, and the realization of prototype/production systems. Additional themes include: Web 2.0 and network security, cyber-crime economics, email spam, research ethics, computer supported collaborative work, and technical writing.
Recent research highlights include the development of an anti-vandalism tool (STiki) that has removed 200,000+ unconstructive edits from English Wikipedia. My publication "Link Spamming Wikipedia for Profit" was awarded the Best Paper award at CEAS 2011 (Collaboration, Electronic Messaging, Anti-Abuse, and Spam). Another writing, "What Wikipedia Deletes: Characterizing Dangerous Collaborative Content" was recently featured by the Chronicle of Higher Education.
Selected/recent writings while a graduate student at UPenn (see C.V. for full listing):
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West, A.G., and Lee, I. (2012). Towards Content-driven Reputation for Collaborative Code Repositories. In WikiSym '12: Proceedings of the 8th International Symposium on Wikis and Open Collaboration, Linz, Austria. [PDF | ABSTRACT-TXT | SLIDES-PDF | SLIDES-PPT] |
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West, A.G., Hayati, P., Potdar, V., and Lee, I. (2012). Spamming for Science: Active Measurement in Web 2.0 Abuse Research. In WECSR '12: Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Ethics in Computer Security Research, Kralendijk, Bonaire (To be published in a forthcoming LNCS volume). [PDF | ABSTRACT-TXT | SLIDES-PDF | SLIDES-PPT] |
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West, A.G., and Lee, I. (2012). Open Wikis and the Protection of Institutional Welfare. Research Bulletin, EDUCAUSE Center for Applied Research, Boulder, CO, USA. [LINK] |
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West, A.G., Agrawal, A., Baker, P., Exline, B., and Lee, I. (2011). Autonomous Link Spam Detection in Purely Collaborative Environments. In WikiSym '11: Proceedings of the 7th International Symposium on Wikis and Open Collaboration, pp. 91-100, Mountain View, CA, USA. [PDF | ABSTRACT-TXT | SLIDES-PDF | SLIDES-PPT] |
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West, A.G., and Lee, I. (2011). What Wikipedia Deletes: Characterizing Dangerous Collaborative Content. In WikiSym '11: Proceedings of the 7th International Symposium on Wikis and Open Collaboration, pp. 25-28, Mountain View, CA, USA. [PDF | ABSTRACT-TXT | SLIDES-PDF | SLIDES-PPT] |
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West, A.G., Chang, J., Venkatasubramanian, K., Sokolsky, O., and Lee, I. (2011). Link Spamming Wikipedia for Profit. In CEAS '11: Proc. of the 8th Annual Collaboration, Electronic Messaging, Anti-Abuse, and Spam Conference, pp. 152-161, Perth, Australia. (co-Best Paper Award). [PDF | ABSTRACT-TXT | SLIDES-PDF | SLIDES-PPT] |
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Adler, B.T., de Alfaro, L., Mola-Velasco, S.M., Rosso, P., and
West, A.G. (2011). Wikipedia Vandalism Detection: Combining Natural Language,
Metadata, and Reputation Features. In CICLing '11: Proc. of the 12th
Intl. Conference on Intelligent Text Processing and Computational
Linguistics. LNCS 6609, pp. 277-288. Tokyo, Japan. [PDF | ABSTRACT-TXT] |
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West, A.G., Aviv, A.J., Chang, J., & Lee, I. (2010). Spam Mitigation using Spatio-Temporal Reputations from Blacklist History. In ACSAC '10: Proceedings of the 26th Annual Computer Security Applications Conference, pp. 161-170. Austin, Texas, USA. (Preliminarily published as UPENN-MS-CIS-10-04). [PDF | ABSTRACT-TXT | SLIDES] |
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West, A.G., Kannan, S., & Lee, I. (2010). Detecting Wikipedia Vandalism via Spatio-Temporal Analysis of Revision Metadata. In EUROSEC '10: Proceedings of the Third European Workshop on System Security, pp. 22-28. Paris, France. (A preliminary version was published as UPENN-MS-CIS-10-05). [PDF | ABSTRACT-TXT | SLIDES] |
| STiki (Spatio-Temporal analysis over Wikipedia): A Wikipedia anti-vandalism tool consisting of a back-end engine for real-time revision processing and a user-facing GUI which presents probable-vandalism to users. An extension to this software includes the code/analysis necessary to detect link spam edits. Software. [WEBSITE] |
| WikiAudit: Provided an IP range, this tool produces a report of contibutions on some wiki (e.g., Wikipedia) from those addresses, with heuristics to detect unconstructive changes. Useful for network admins and investigations into author bias. Software. [WEBSITE] |
| Wikipedia Vandalism Corpus: Listing of 5.7 million automatically-parsed and 5,000 manually-confirmed incidents of vandalism on the English-language edition of Wikipedia. Corpus. Last updated: 2010/03/05. [ZIP | README-TXT] |
| Reputation Management Simulator: A framework to evaluate reputation algorithm performance. Software. Last updated: 2009/10/25. [ZIP | DIAGRAM-PNG] |
Here I attach presentations/talks/demos I have given that may be of general interest. This does not include conference/workshop presentations (see "Publications" above):
| West, A.G. (2011).
Anti-Vandalism Research: The Year in Review [SLIDES-PDF | SLIDES-PPT]
-and-
Autonomous Detection of Collaborative Link Spam [SLIDES-PDF | SLIDES-PPT]. Both presented at Wikimania '11, Haifa, Israel, Aug. 2011.
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| West, A.G., Kannan, S., and Lee, I. (2010). STiki: An Anti-Vandalism Tool for Wikipedia using Spatio-Temporal Analysis of Revision Metadata. Presented at WikiSym '10 and Wikimania '10, Gdansk, Poland, July 2010. [DEMO-PROPOSAL | SLIDES | POSTER]
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| West, A.G. (2008). An Introduction to LaTeX. Presentation to UPenn TCP Fellows, Oct. 2008. (LaTeX and BibTeX basics; editorial notes). [SLIDES-PDF]
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In 10 semesters of the Senior Capstone course, 100+ student teams and their year-long research/implementation projects have been advised and evaluated. Guiding project management, methodology, and technical writing components has provided tremendous experience in planning towards successful research outcomes.
When not hard-at-work researching, I fulfill the following roles within the University:
Additionally, on a purely personal level, I have three fanatical interests in life:
Andrew G. West
Department of CIS
Levine Hall
3330 Walnut Street
Philadelphia, PA 19104
Office: Levine 613
E-Mail: westand {at, @} cis.upenn.edu
