Aritra Konar

Assistant Professor
Department of Electrical Engineering (ESAT)
STADIUS Center for Dynamical Systems, Signal Processing, and Data Analytics
KU Leuven
Kasteelpark Arenberg 10, bus 2446
B-3001 Leuven, Belgium
Office B00.21
Email: aritra.konar at kuleuven.be

About me

I am a tenure-track Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering, at KU Leuven. I received the M.S and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Minnesota - Twin Cities in 2014 and 2017, respectively. After my Ph.D., I conducted postdoctoral research at the University of Virginia.

My research interests lie at the confluence of signals, systems, and data science. At present, my research is centered on the general areas of Graph Mining, Optimization, and Machine Learning. I am broadly interested in developing cutting-edge algorithmic tools in convex and submodular optimization for tackling challenging problems arising in mining massive networked systems. Recent problems that I have worked on include graph matching and subgraph mining.

Grants awarded

• NSF IIS 1908070: III: Small: A Submodular Framework for Scalable Graph Matching with Performance Guarantees (2019-2022). PI: N. D. Sidiropoulos, CoPI: A. Konar. [Award abstract]

Recent News

• November 2023: paper titled "Minimizing low-rank models of high-order tensors: Hardness, span, tight relaxation, and applications" has been accepted for publication in the IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing.

• February 2022: Paper titled "The Triangle-densest-k Subgraph Problem: Hardness, Lovasz extension, and Application to Document Summarization" has been accepted for publication at the AAAI 2022 conference ( Acceptance Rate: 15% ).

• May 2021: Paper titled "Joint Graph Embedding and Alignment with Spectral Pivot" has been accepted for publication in the Research Track of the ACM SIGKDD 2021 conference ( Acceptance Rate: 15.6% ).

• October 2020: Paper titled "Exploring the Subgraph Density-Size Trade-off via the Lovasz Extension" has been accepted for publication at the ACM WSDM 2021 conference ( Acceptance Rate: 18.6% ).

• August 2020: Paper titled "Soft Graph Matching: Submodular Relaxation and Lovasz Extension" has been accepted for publication as a full paper at the IEEE ICDM 2020 conference ( Acceptance Rate: 9.8% ).

• July 2020: Journal paper titled "Graph Matching via the Lens of Supermodularity" has been accepted for publication in the proceedings of the IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering.

• May 2020: Paper titled "Mining Large Quasi-cliques with Quality Guarantees from Vertex Neighborhoods" has been accepted for publication in the Research Track of the ACM SIGKDD 2020 conference ( Acceptance Rate: 16.9% ).

• October 2019: (Grant) Received a new NSF grant (as coPI) on peforming graph matching using tools from submodular optimization.

• September 2019: Invited to give a talk in the Network Science Seminar at the Biocomplexity Institute, University of Virginia.

• August 2019: Paper titled "Iterative graph alignment via supermodular approximation" has been accepted for presentation at the IEEE International Conference on Data Mining (ICDM) 2019.