BGU



Michael Fire


My passion is data. Specifically, I want to use massive datasets in innovative and effective ways to make the world a better place. I am a Senior Lecturer (Assistant Professor) at the Software and Information Systems Engineering Department at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU). Recently, I founded the Data Science for Social Good Lab. Data science was a central part of my PhD studies, for which I was awarded the Kreitman Prize. Later I was the recipient of the Moore/Sloan Data Science Fellowship and the WRF Innovation Postdoctoral Fellow in Data Science at the University of Washington. My main research interests lie in big data, machine learning, social network analysis, and security and privacy. Also, I have gained extensive hands-on experience as a data scientist working for several companies and organizations.

Selected Project Videos

Selected Research Projects

  • Network Dynamics
  • Computational Genealogy
  • Improving Road Safety
  • Social Privacy Protector
  • Organization Mining
  • Predicting Students’ Exam Scores.
  • Guided Socialbots
  • The Social Amplifier

Publications

Selected Publications
  • Kagan, Dima, Galit Fuhrmann Alpert, and Michael Fire, "Automatic Large Scale Detection of Red Palm Weevil Infestation using Aerial and Street View Images", Elsevier ISPRS Journal of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing 2021 (to appear)
  • Aviad Elyashar, Rami Puzis, and Michael Fire, "It Runs in the Family: Searching for Synonyms Using Digitized Family Trees", IEEE Transactions on Knowledge & Data Engineering (TKDE), 2021
  • Michael Fire and Carlos Guestrin, “The Rise and Fall of Network Stars: Analyzing 2.5 Million Graphs to Reveal How High-Degree Vertices Emerge over Time,” Elsevier Information Processing & Management , 2020.      
  • Michael Fire and Carlos Guestrin, “Over-Optimization of Academic Publishing Metrics: Observing Goodhart's Law in Action,” GigaScience, 8(6), giz053, 2019.  
  • Michael Fire, Roy Goldschmidt, and Yuval Elovici, "Online Social Networks Threats and Solutions," IEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials, Volume 16, Issue 4, 2014.
  • Michael Fire and Rami Puzis, "Organization Mining Using Online Social Networks," Springer Networks and Spatial Economics (NETS), 2015.  
  • Michael Fire, Lena Tenenboim, Rami Puzis, Ofrit Lesser, Lior Rokach, and Yuval Elovici, "Computationally Efficient Link Prediction in a Variety of Social Networks," ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology, Volume 5, Article 10, 2013.   1  2  3 
  • Yaniv Altshuler, Michael Fire, Erez Shmueli, Yuval Elovici, Alfred Bruckstein, Alex (Sandy) Pentland, and David Lazer, "The Social Amplifier – Reaction of Human Communities to Emergencies," Journal of Statistical Physics, Volume 152, Number 3, 2013.
My co-authorship social network (February 2016).
Journals
  • Kagan, Dima, Galit Fuhrmann Alpert, and Michael Fire, "Automatic Large Scale Detection of Red Palm Weevil Infestation using Aerial and Street View Images", Elsevier ISPRS Journal of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing 2021 (to appear)
  • Aviad Elyashar, Rami Puzis, and Michael Fire, "It Runs in the Family: Searching for Synonyms Using Digitized Family Trees", IEEE Transactions on Knowledge & Data Engineering (TKDE), 2021
  • Aviad Elyashar, Rami Puzis, and Michael Fire, "How does that name sound? Name representation learning using accent-specific speech generation", Elsevier Knowledge-based Systems 2021  
  • Kagan, Dima, Galit Fuhrmann Alpert, and Michael Fire, "Zooming Into Video Conferencing Privacy and Security Threats", 2020  
  • Kagan, Dima, Jacob Moran-Gilad, and Michael Fire, "Scientometric trends for coronaviruses and other emerging viral infections." GigaScience 9.8 (2020): giaa085  
  • Kagan, Dima, Thomas Chesney, and Michael FireB, "Using data science to understand the film industry's gender gap." Nature Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, 6.1 (2020): 1-16  
  • Michael Fire and Carlos Guestrin, “The Rise and Fall of Network Stars: Analyzing 2.5 Million Graphs to Reveal How High-Degree Vertices Emerge over Time," Elsevier Information Processing & Management, 2020.      
  • Michael Fire and Carlos Guestrin, “Over-Optimization of Academic Publishing Metrics: Observing Goodhart's Law in Action," GigaScience, 8(6), giz053, 2019.  
  • Dima Kagan, Michael Fire, and Yuval Elovici, “Generic Anomalous Vertices Detection Utilizing Link Prediction Algorithm,” Springer Journal of Social Network Analysis and Mining (SNAM), 2018.    
  • Olga Peled, Michael Fire, Lior Rokach, and Yuval Elovici, "Matching Entities across Online Social Networks," Elsevier Neurocomputing, Volume 210, 2016.
  • Michael Fire and Rami Puzis, "Organization Mining using Online Social Networks," Springer Networks and Spatial Economics (NETS), 2015.    
  • Michael Fire and Yuval Elovici, “Data Mining of Online Genealogy Datasets for Revealing Lifespan Patterns in Human Population,” ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology, Volume 6, Article 2, 2015.  
  • Michael Fire, Roy Goldschmidt, and Yuval Elovici, "Online Social Networks Threats and Solutions," IEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials, Volume 16, Issue 4, 2014.
  • Aviad Elishar, Michael Fire, Dima Kagan, and Yuval Elovici, “Guided Socialbots: Infiltrating User's Friends List," AI Communications , Volume 29, Number 1, 2014.
  • Michael Fire, Dima Kagan, Aviad Elishar, and Yuval Elovici, "Friends or Foe? Fake Profile Identification in Online Social Networks," Springer Journal of Social Network Analysis and Mining (SNAM), Volume 4, Number 1, 2014.  
  • Michael Fire, Lena Tenenboim, Rami Puzis, Ofrit Lesser, Lior Rokach, and Yuval Elovici, "Computationally Efficient Link Prediction in a Variety of Social Networks," ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology, Volume 5, Article 10, 2013.   1  2  3 
  • Yuval Elovici, Michael Fire, Amir Herzberg, and Haya Shulman, "Ethical Considerations when Employing Fake Identities in Online Social Networks for Research," Springer Journal of Science and Engineering Ethics (JSEE), Volume 20, Number 4, 2013.
  • Yaniv Altshuler, Michael Fire, Erez Shmueli, Yuval Elovici, Alfred Bruckstein, Alex (Sandy) Pentland, and David Lazer, "The Social Amplifier – Reaction of Human Communities to Emergencies," Journal of Statistical Physics, Volume 152, Number 3, 2013.
  • Michael Fire, Gilad Katz, and Yuval Elovici, "Strangers Intrusion Detection – Detecting Spammers and Fake Profiles in Social Networks Based on Topology Anomalies," ASE Human Journal, 2012.
Conferences
  • Michael Fire and Johnathan Schler, “Exploring Online Ad Images Using a Deep Convolutional Neural Network Approach,” The 3rd IEEE International Conference on Smart Data (SmartData)}, Exeter, UK, June 2017.
  • Dima Kagan, Michael Fire, and Yuval Elovici, "Finding a needle in a haystack: detecting outliers in complex networks," NetSci-X, Tel Aviv, Israel, January 2017.
  • Dima Kagan, Michael Fire, Aviad Elishar, and Yuval Elovici, "Facebook Applications Installation and Removal- Temporal Analysis," The Third International Conference on Social Eco-Informatics (SOTICS), Lisbon, Portugal, November 2013.
  • Olga Peled, Michael Fire, Lior Rokach, and Yuval Elovici, "Entity Matching in Online Social Networks," ASE/IEEE International Conference on Social Computing (SocialCom), Washington D.C., USA, September 2013.
  • Yaniv Altshuler, Michael Fire, Erez Shmueli, Yuval Elovici, Alfred Bruckstein, Alex (Sandy) Pentland, and David Lazer, "The Social Amplifier – Reaction of Human Communities to Emergencies," NetMob 2013, MIT, Cambridge, MA, USA, May 2013.
  • Yaniv Altshuler, Michael Fire, Nadav Aharony, Zeev Volkovich, Yuval Elovici, and Alex ("Sandy") Pentland, "Trade-offs in Social and Behavioral Modeling in Mobile Networks," SBP, Washington D.C., USA, April 2013.
  • Yaniv Altshuler, Michael Fire, Erez Shmueli, Yuval Elovici, Alfred Bruckstein , Alex (Sandy) Pentland, and David Lazer, "Detecting Anomalous Behaviors Using Structural Properties of Social Networks," SBP, Washington D.C., USA, April 2013.
  • Aviad Elishar, Michael Fire, Dima Kagan, and Yuval Elovici, "Organizational Intrusion: Organization Mining using Socialbots," International Conference on Cyber Security (CyberSec), Washington D.C., USA, December 2012.
  • Michael Fire, Gilad Katz, Yuval Elovici, Bracha Shapira, and Lior Rokach, "Predicting Students' Exam Scores by Analyzing Social Network Data," The International Conference on Active Media Technology (AMT), Springer LNCS, Macau, December 2012  
  • Michael Fire, Dima Kagan, Rami Puzis, Lior Rokach, and Yuval Elovici, "Data Mining Opportunities in Geosocial Networks for Improving Road Safety," IEEE 27th Convention of Electrical and Electronics Engineers in Israel, Eilat, Israel, November 2012
  • Yehonatan Bitton, Michael Fire, Dima Kagan, Bracha Shapira, Lior Rokach, and Judit Bar-Ilan, "Social Network Based Search for Experts," The Sixth Symposium on Human-Computer Interaction and Information Retrieval (HCIR), IBM Research, Cambridge, MA., USA, October 2012.
  • Michael Fire, Dima Kagan, Aviad Elishar, and Yuval Elovici, "Social Privacy Protector - Protecting Users' Privacy in Social Networks," The Second International Conference on Social Eco-Informatics (SOTICS), Venice, Italy, October 2012.   
  • Yaniv Altshuler, Alex ("Sandy") Pentland, Alfred Bruckstein, Michael Fire, Yuval Elovici, and David Lazer, "Real World Anomalous Events Detection Based on Social Signals in Mobile Network Traffic," NetSci, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, USA, June 2012.
  • Yaniv Altshuler, Michael Fire, Nadav Aharony, Yuval Elovici, and Alex ("Sandy") Pentland, "How Many Makes a Crowd? On the Correlation between Groups' Size and the Accuracy of Modeling," SBP, Volume 7227, pp. 43-52, University of Maryland, College Park, MD, USA, April 2012.
  • Michael Fire, Lena Tenenboim, Ofrit Lesser, Rami Puzis, Lior Rokach, and Yuval Elovici, "Link Prediction in Social Networks using Computationally Efficient Topological Features," IEEE Third SocialCom, pp. 73-80 MIT, Boston, MA, USA, October 2011.
  • Michael Fire, "Statistics on Signed Permutations," The 18th International Conference on Formal Power Series & Algebraic Combinatorics (FPSAC), San Diego, CA, USA, June 2006.
Book Chapters
Workshop & Poster Papers
  • Aviad Elishar, Michael Fire, Dima Kagan, and Yuval Elovici, "Homing Socialbots: Intrusion on a Specific Organization's Employee Using Socialbots," International Workshop on Social Network Analysis in Applications SNAA, co-located with ASONAM 2013, Niagara Falls, Canada, August 2013.
  • Guy Rapaport, Dima Kagan, Michael Fire, and Keren Fruchter "Unfolding Discussions in Social Media," The Second Data Mining for Business Intelligence Conference (DMBI), 2014 (Poster).
  • Yaniv Altshuler, Nadav Aharony, Michael Fire, Yuval Elovici, and Alex ("Sandy") Pentland, "Incremental Learning with Accuracy Prediction of Social and Individual Properties from Mobile-Phone Data," WS3P, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, September 2012.
Technical Reports
  • Michael Fire, Thomas Chesney, and Yuval Elovici, "Quantitative Analysis of Genealogy Using Digitised Family Trees," 2014.      
  • Thomas Chesney and Michael Fire, "Diffusion through networks of heterogenous nodes in a population characterized by homophily," 2014
  • Michael Fire, “Social Network Data Analytics using Machine Learning and Graph Theory Algorithms,” Ph.D. dissertation, 2013
  • Michael Fire “Statistics on Wreath Products,” M.Sc. Thesis, 2004.
Patents
  • Michael Fire, Rami Puzis, and Yuval Elovici, “System and Method For Determining by an External Entity the Human Hierarchical Structure of An Organization, Using Public Social Networks.”
  • Michael Fire, Gilad Katz, and Yuval Elovici, “Method for Detecting Spammers and Fake Profiles in Social Networks” (pending patent).
  • Michael Fire, Dima Kagan, Aviad Elishar, and Yuval Elovici, “Method for Protecting User Privacy in Social Networks” (pending patent).
  • Michael Fire and Johnathan Schler, “A System and Method for Improving Image-Based Advertisement Success” (pending patent registration no. 61/614,006).

Downloadable Datasets

Here you can download datasets created as a result of the studies presented above:

Directed Social Networks

AnyBeat

  • Nodes Number:  12,645
  • Edges Number: 67,054
  • Year: 2012
AnyBeat

Academia.edu

  • Nodes Number:  200,169
  • Edges Number: 1,398,063
  • Year: 2013
Academia.edu

Google+

  • Nodes Number: 211,187
  • Edges Number: 1,506,896
  • Year: 2013
Google+
Directed Multigraph Social Networks

Students’ Cooperation

  • Nodes Number: 185
  • Edges Number: 360
  • Year: 2013
Students’ Cooperation Social Network

WikiTree

  • Nodes Number: 1,382,751
  • Edges Number: 9,192,212
  • Year: 2012
WikiTree
Undirected Social Networks

The Marker Cafe

  • Nodes Number: 69,411
  • Edges Number: 1,644,848
  • Year: 2011
The Marker Cafe

Organizations

  • Networks Number: 6
  • Nodes Number: from 500 to 50,000
  • Year: 2013
Organizations' Social Networks
Social Network Evolution

Reddit

  • Networks Number: 20,128
  • Year: 2017
Dynamic Networks
Anomalous Vertices Detection
Time Series

Facebook Applications Installation

  • Records Number: 44,514
  • Year: 2014
Facebook Applications

First Name
Distributions

  • Number of Names: 12,227
  • Year: 2014
First Name Distributions

Network Vertex Join Curves

  • Number of Curves: 38,129
  • Year: 2017
Subreddit User Arrival Curves

Press

Research Title Date Publication
Scientometric trends for coronaviruses and other emerging viral infectionss August 2020 BioWorld
August 2020 GigaBlog
August 2020 JPost
August 2020 Ynet
August 2020 TheMarker
Zooming Into Video Conferencing Privacy and Security Threats July 2020 JPost
July 2020 Info Security Magazine
July 2020 Ynet
Using data science to understand the film industry’s gender gap July 2020 On Society
July 2020 Ynet
Over-Optimization of Academic Publishing Metrics: Observing Goodhart's Law in Action June 2019 Times Higher Education
June 2019 The Gradient
Fake Profiles Detection April 2018 The Register
April 2018 Communications of the ACM
April 2018 The Hindu BusinessLine
April 2018 American Security Today
April 2018 phys.org
Organization Mining using Online Social Networks April 2013 NY TIMES
April 2013 Tecnoetica
March 2013 MIT Technology Review
Social Amplifier August 2013 Academia.edu Blog
July 2013 The Jerusalem Post
July 2013 IEEE Spectrum
Friends or Foe? Fake Profile Identification in Online Social Networks March 2013 The Connectivist
August 2012 Israel21c
July 2012 Examiner
July 2012 Facerooks
July 2012 NBC News
July 2012 NDTV
July 2012 Tech2
July 2012 Tech News Daily
July 2012 Think Digit
July 2012 The Times of Israel
Predicting Students' Exam Scores by Analyzing Social Network Data March 2014 Academia.edu Blog
December 2012 CTV News
December 2012 NoCamels
December 2012 NRG Maariv
December 2012 Science Daily
December 2012 Phys.ORG
Data Mining of Online Genealogy Datasets for Revealing Lifespan Patterns in Human Population December 2013 The Physics arXiv Blog
Data Mining Opportunities in Geosocial Networks for Improving Road Safety January 2013 IBN
January 2013 JUF News
January 2013 The Times of Israel
January 2013 UPI
January 2013 Yahoo! India News
December 2012 Haaretz
December 2012 Globes
December 2012 The Jerusalem Post