Liao and his collaborators - Lei Shi and Chunxin Yang - received the Visual Analytics Science and Technology (VAST) 2012 Challenge Award for their paper, "Investigating Network Traffic through Compressed Graph Visualization" in recognition for their "Good Adaptation of Graph Analysis Techniques."

As the amount of information flowing across networks has increased exponentially over the past decade, today's Internet has moved into a new era known as "big data." Almost all large-scale networks can be modeled as graphs, to which Liao's research group refers to as "big graphs." The security implication of these large networks becomes increasingly important and challenging.

Liao and his research colleagues developed novel algorithms for understanding and analyzing abnormal changes (or anomalies) in these large and dynamic graphs. In particular, the algorithms transform large network graphs into much smaller, compressed graphs with little topological information loss. An interactive overview and context visualization tool has also been developed to help network operators monitor the latest network traffic to improve situation awareness, real-time troubleshooting and security-related investigations.

Liao's research findings will have applications on many other types of large networks such as biological (DNS/protein) networks, sensor networks and national infrastructure networks.

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