Our mission is to build the most scalable library for graph algorithms and analysis and apply it to a multitude of Google products.
About the team
We formalize data mining and machine learning challenges as graph problems and perform fundamental research in those fields leading to publications in top venues. Our algorithms and systems are used in a wide array of Google products such as Search, YouTube, AdWords, Play, Maps, and Social.
Research areas
Team focus summaries
Highlighted projects
Adaptive Massively Parallel Computation (AMPC) augments the theoretical capabilities of MapReduce, providing a pathway to solve many graph problems in fewer computation rounds; the suite of algorithms, which includes algorithms for maximal independent set, maximum matching, connected components and minimum spanning tree, work up to 7x faster than current state-of-the-art approaches.
Solving large-scale optimization problems often starts with graph partitioning, which means partitioning the vertices of the graph into clusters to be processed on different machines. The need to make sure that clusters are of near equal size gives rise to the balanced graph partitioning problem. This NP-hard problem is notoriously difficult in practice because the best approximation algorithms for small instances rely on semidefinite programming which is impractical for larger instances.
We present the results of two recent papers on graph embedding: “Is a Single Embedding Enough? Learning Node Representations that Capture Multiple Social Contexts'' presented at WWW’19 and “Watch Your Step: Learning Node Embeddings via Graph Attention” at NeurIPS’18. The first paper introduces a novel technique to learn multiple embeddings per node, enabling a better characterization of networks with overlapping communities. The second addresses the fundamental problem of hyperparameter tuning in graph embeddings, allowing one to easily deploy graph embedding methods with less effort.
The Mining and Learning with Graphs at Scale workshop focused on methods for operating on massive information networks: graph-based learning and graph algorithms for a wide range of areas such as detecting fraud and abuse, query clustering and duplication detection, image and multi-modal data analysis, privacy-respecting data mining and recommendation, and experimental design under interference.
Some of our publications
Algorithms, vol. 12:8 (2019), pp. 162
WSDM (2015), pp. 419-420
Proceedings of VLDB (2016)
Proceedings of the 26th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery & Data Mining, Association for Computing Machinery (2020), 2523–2532
Proceedings of the 22th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (2016)