Wen Dong

Assistant Professor
Department of Computer Science and Engineering
Institute of Sustainable Transportation and Logistics
SUNY at Buffalo

306 Davis Hall
Buffalo, NY 14260
Phone: (716) 645-1589
Email: wendong at buffalo dot edu

I am actively recruiting PhD students

Research Highlights

Wen Dong focuses on modeling human interaction dynamics with stochastic process theory through combining the power of “big data” and the logic/reasoning power of state-of-the-art agent-based models, to solve our societies most challenging problems such as transportation sustainability and efficiency.

His approach is to drive “simulation games” (alike SimCity) with petabyte-sized “data exhaust trails” of networked people to study our social systems and make decisions through playing the data-driven simulation games on super-computers (which solve the stochastic differential equations that describe the agent behavior).

He has applied this approach to social systems of different sizes, ranging from the movement of millions of vehicle locations sampled every minute for years, the co-evolution of social network and individual behavior of different communities tracked by personal mobile phones and surveys, and Bales’ interaction process analysis of several individuals solving problems tracked by socio-metric badges. The applications have won both industrial and academic awards.

Selected Publications

Journal papers

Conference papers

  • Fan Yang, Alina Vereshchaka, Changyou Chen, and Wen Dong. “Bayesian Multi-type Mean Field Multi-agent Imitation Learning.” In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS 2020, spotlight presentation).

  • Fan Yang, Bruno Lepri, and Wen Dong. “Optimal Control in Partially Observable Complex Social Systems.” In Proceedings of the 2020 International Conference on Autonomous Agents & Multiagent System (AAMAS 2020, acceptance rate 23%).

  • Fan Yang, Alina Vereshchaka, Yufan Zhou, Changyou Chen, and Wen Dong. “Variational Adversarial Kernel Learned Imitation Learning.” In Proceedings of the 2020 AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (acceptance rate 20.6%).

  • Lutnick, Brendon, Brandon Ginley, Kuang-Yu Jen, Wen Dong, and Pinaki Sarder. “Generative modeling for label-free glomerular modeling and classification.” In Medical Imaging 2020: Digital Pathology, vol. 11320, p. 1132007. International Society for Optics and Photonics, 2020.

  • Alina Vereshchaka and Wen Dong. Reducing Risks during Natural Disasters with Optimal Resource Allocation by Multi-agent Optimization. In Proceedings of 2019 Winter Simulation Conference.

  • Fan Yang, Alina Vereshchaka, and Wen Dong. Optimizing Complex Interaction Dynamics in Critical Infrastructure with a Stochastic Kinetic Model. In Proceedings of 2019 Winter Simulation Conference.

  • Le Fang, Chunyuan Li, Jianfeng Gao, Wen Dong, and Changyou Chen. “Implicit Deep Latent Variable Models for Text Generation.” In Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP), pp. 3937-3947. 2019 (acceptance rate 23.8%).

  • Alina Vereshchaka and Wen Dong. “Dynamic Resource Allocation During Natural Disasters Using Multi-agent Environment.” In International Conference on Social Computing, Behavioral-Cultural Modeling and Prediction and Behavior Representation in Modeling and Simulation, pp. 123-132. Springer, Cham, 2019. (SBP-BRiMS 2019).

  • Fan Yang, Bo Liu and Wen Dong. Optimal Control of Complex Systems through Variational Inference with a Discrete Event Decision Process. In International Foundation for Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, 2019 (AAMAS 2019, acceptance rate 24%).

  • Fan Yang, Alina Vereshchaka, and Wen Dong. Predicting and Optimizing City-Scale Road Traffic Dynamics Using Trajectories of Individual Vehicles. In 2018 IEEE International Conference on Big Data (Big Data), pp. 173-180. IEEE, 2018.

  • Le Fang, Fan Yang, Wen Dong, Tong Guan and Chunming Qiao. Expectation Propagation with Stochastic Kinetic Model in Complex Interaction Systems. In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 30 (NIPS 2017, acceptance rate 20.9%).

  • Fan Yang and Wen Dong. Integrating Simulation and Signal Processing with Stochastic Social Kinetic Model. Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Social, Cultural, and Behavioral Modeling & Prediction and Behavior Representation in Modeling and Simulation (SBP-BRiMS 2017, full paper acceptance rate: 20%, best student paper award).

  • Tong Guan, Le Fang, Wen Dong, Yunfei Hou and Chunming Qiao. Indoor Localization with Asymmetric Grid-based Filters in Large Areas Utilizing Smartphones. Proceedings of the 2017 IEEE International Conference on Communications.

  • Tong Guan, Wen Dong, Dimitrios Koutsonikolas and Chunming Qiao. Fine-grained Location Extraction and Prediction with Little Known Data. Proceedings of the 2017 IEEE Wireless Communications and Networking Conference (WCNC) - Emerging Technologies, Architectures and Services. (best paper award)

  • Tong Guan, Le Fang, Wen Dong and Chunming Qiao. Robust Indoor Localization with Smartphones through Statistical Filtering. Proceedings of the 2017 IEEE International Conference on Computing, Networking and Communications (ICNC): Wireless Networks.

  • Zhen Xu, Wen Dong, Sargur (Hari) Srihari. Using Social Dynamics to Make Individual Predictions: Variational Inference with Stochastic Kinetic Model. Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 29 (NIPS 2016, acceptance rate 22.7%).

  • Wen Dong. Variational Inference with Agent-Based Models. In Proceedings of the 2016 International Conference on Autonomous Agents & Multiagent Systems, pp. 854-863. International Foundation for Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, 2016 (AAMAS 2016, acceptance rate 25%).

  • Le Fang, Tong Guan, Wen Dong, and Chunming Qiao. Tracking the Diffusion of Contact-Induced Disease from Social Interactions and Limited Observations of Symptoms. In 2016 IEEE First International Conference on Connected Health: Applications, Systems and Engineering Technologies (CHASE), pp. 340-341. IEEE, 2016.

  • Tong Guan, Wen Dong, Dimitrios Koutsonikolas, Geoffrey Challen, Chunming Qiao. Robust, Cost-Effective and Scalable Localization in Large Indoor Areas. In Proceedings ot the 2015 IEEE Global Communications Conference. (acceptance rate 35%)

  • Wen Dong. Interpreting Big Data with Agent-Based Modeling. In Proceedings of 2015 Winter Simulation Conference. pp. 713-724. IEEE Press, 2015.

  • Neeti Pokhriyal, Wen Dong, and Venugopal Govindaraju. Virtual Networks and Poverty Analysis in Senegal. In NetMob 2015. MIT Media Lab, MA, USA, 2015 (Senegal National Statistics award of Data for Development challenge)

  • Wen Dong, Katherine Heller, and Alex Pentland. Graph-Coupled HMMs for Modeling the Spread of Infection. In Proceedings of 28th Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence. Catalina Island, CA, USA, 2012: 227-236

  • Wen Dong, Katherine Heller, and Alex Pentland. Modeling Infection with Multi-agent Dynamics. In Proceedings of the 2012 International Conference on Social Computing, Behavioral-Cultural Modeling, & Prediction. D.C., USA, 2012: 172-179 (best paper award)

  • Wen Dong, Bruno Lepri, and Alex Pentland. Modeling the Co-evolution of Behaviors and Social Relationships Using Mobile Phone Data. In Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous Multimedia. Beijing, China, 2011:134-143. Invited and extended work in Tsinghua Science and Technology 2012, 17(2): 136-151

  • Wen Dong, Daniel Olguin-Olguin, Ben Waber, Taemie Kim, and Alex Pentland. Modeling Organizational Dynamics from Sensor Network Data. In Proceedings of 9th International Conference on Wearable and Implantable Body Sensor Networks. London, U.K., 2012: 130-135

  • Wen Dong, Bruno Lepri, and Alex Pentland. Automatic Prediction of Small Group Performance in Information Sharing Tasks. In Proceedings of Collective Intelligence. Boston, MA, USA, 2012

  • Wen Dong, Bruno Lepri, Taemie Kim, Fabio Pianesi, and Alex Pentland. Modeling Conversational Dynamics and Performance in a Social Dilemma Task. In Proceedings of 5th International Symposium on Communications, Control, and Signal Processing, Rome, Italy, 2012

  • Bruno Lepri, Wen Dong, Fabio Pianesi, and Alex Pentland. Modeling Individuals and Groups in Face-to- Face Interactions. In NIPS 2010 Workshop — Human Communication Dynamics

  • Wei Pan, Manuel Cebrian, Wen Dong, Taemie Kim, and Alex Pentland. Modeling Dynamical Influence in Human Interaction Patterns. In NIPS 2010 Workshop — Computational Social Science and the Wisdom of Crowds

  • Wen Dong and Alex Pentland. Quantifying Group Problem Solving Using Social Signal Analysis. In Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Multimodal Interfaces. Beijing, China, 2010:40-43

  • Wen Dong and Alex Pentland. A Network Analysis of Road Traffic with Vehicle Tracking Data. In AAAI Spring Symposium on Human Behavior Modeling. Palo Alto, California, USA, 2009

  • Wen Dong, Taemie Kim, and Alex Pentland. A Quantitative Analysis of Collective Creativity in Playing 20-Questions Games. In Proceedings of ACM C&C, 2009

  • Wen Dong, Bruno Lepri, Alessandro Cappelletti, Alex Pentland, Fabio Pianesi, and Massimo Zancanaro. Using the Influence Model to Recognize Functional Roles in Meeting. In Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Multimodal Interfaces. Nagoya, Japan, 2007:271-278

  • Wen Dong and Alex Pentland. Influence Modeling and Network Discovery. NetSci, 2007

  • Wen Dong and Alex Pentland. Multi-sensor Data Fusion Using the Influence Model. In Proceedings of 3rd International Conference on Wearable and Implantable Body Sensor Networks. Boston, MA, USA, 2006: 72-75

Teaching

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