Acknowledgments

We thank many colleagues who made substantial contributions in various ways to this book project. The members at the Social Computing Group, Data Mining and Machine Learning Lab at ASU made this project much easier and enjoyable. They include Magdiel Galan, Shamanth Kumar, Sai Moturu, Lei Tang, Xufei Wang, Reza Zafarani, and Zheng Zhao.

We really appreciate Morgan & Claypool and particularly executive editor Diane D. Cerra for helping us throughout this project. The work is part of the projects sponsored by grants from AFOSR and ONR.

Last, and certainly not least, we thank our families, for supporting us through this fun but time-consuming project. We dedicate this book to them, with love.

Nitin Agarwal and Huan Liu
July 2009