I am a third year PhD student at the Department of Computing Science, University of Alberta, working under supervision of Professor Osmar Zaïane. I am doing research in the general area of mining social and information networks, with an emphasis on finding the evolution of their underlying communities.With the definition of the critical events and transitions, we modelled the changes that may occur for a community and tracked its evolution over the observation time. Furthermore, our team developed a tool called Meerkat, to help practitioners better comprehend and analyse vast amount of data in the form of social networks. As a member of this group, I have extended the Meerkat toolbox to visualize the evolution of communities and individuals in a dynamic scenario.

1 -     Mansoureh Takaffoli, Community Evolution in Dynamic Social Networks - Challenges and Problems, IEEE ICDM PhD Student Forum, 2011

2 -     Mansoureh Takaffoli, Justin Fagnan, Farzad Sangi, Osmar R Zaiane, Tracking changes in dynamic information networks, International Conference on Computational Aspects of Social Networks (CASoN), 2011 

3 -     Mansoureh Takaffoli, Farzad Sangi, Justin Fagnan, Osmar R. Zaiane, MODEC - Modeling and Detecting Evolutions of Communities, Fifth International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM), 2011

4 -     Mansoureh Takaffoli, Farzad Sangi, Justin Fagnan, and Osmar R. Zaiane, Community Evolution Mining in Dynamic Social Networks, Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences, Vol.22, pp 49-58, 2011  

5 -     Mansoureh Takaffoli, Farzad Sangi, Justin Fagnan, Osmar R. Zaiane, A Framework for Analyzing Dynamic Social Networks, 7th Conference on Applications of Social Network Analysis (ASNA), 2010.

• Volunteer in International Conference on Data Mining (ICDM), Vancouver, Dec 2011 

• Volunteer in Women in Scholarship, Engineering, Science and Technology (WISEST), University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada, Feb 2010.

WISEST is a University of Alberta organization that delivers exciting programs and meaningful networks to enhance the attraction, retention and advancement for women of all ages in science, engineering and technology.  

• Volunteer in Women in IT (WIT) Conferences, Cryptography session, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada, Feb 2008 & Feb 2009.

WIT is a conference to encourage young women (high school student) to consider computing as a potential study and career field.