Alan P. Sprague
Professor
Department of Computer and
Information Sciences
University of Alabama at Birmingham
Phone: 205-934-8513
Email: sprague at cis dot uab dot edu
Research Interests
Fundamental Algorithms in Data Mining
KDDM Lab web page
Algorithms to compute frequent itemsets, especially closed
frequent itemsets; use of network flow to discover outliers.
Applying Data Mining to Internet Security
We cluster spam email messages in order to gain an understanding
of the world of spam. The largest spam campaigns commonly show up
as the largest clusters.
Sometimes our methodology is to cluster the spammers' hosting domains,
rather than clustering the emails themselves.
One goal is to enable law enforcement to focus on the largest spammers.
Spam Data Mine
We are also working on phishing and malware. We are using clustering
to study phishing, and closed frequent sets to study malware.
Center for Information Assurance and
Joint Forensics Research
Graph Algorithms
Algorithms for special classes of graphs.
The emphasis here is on efficiency. Often, this involves
exploring the "border" between polynomial time problems and
NP-complete problems.
Grammar Inference
Inferring a context free grammar for a domain specific language,
given (positive) samples of the language.
Grammar Inference web page
Education
Ph.D. Computer Science, Ohio State University, 1988
Advisor: Ten-Hwang Lai.
Ph.D. Mathematics, Ohio State University, 1973
Advisor: Dijen K. Ray-Chaudhuri.
Recent Publications
Finite State Automaton (Nondeterministic) Simulator