Arlei Silva

Arlei Silva is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Rice University. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), and M.Sc. and B.Sc. degrees from Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, Brazil. His research focuses on data science, network science, machine learning, and graph algorithms, with applications in flood prediction, graph anomaly detection, and temporal graph analysis. He has held visiting roles at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and has contributed to projects like trajectory compression and network process discovery.

Education:

• Ph.D. in Computer Science, University of California, Santa Barbara (2019)
• M.Sc. in Computer Science, Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, Brazil (2011)
• B.Sc. in Computer Science, Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, Brazil (2008)

Research Interests: His work integrates machine learning and graph theory to address challenges in network dynamics, spatiotemporal modeling, and anomaly detection. Recent projects include FloodGNN-GRU for flood prediction, DOPPLER for dataflow optimization, and Pole for signed network embeddings.

Awards:

• SNAKDD Best Paper Runner-up (2013)
• Best M.Sc. Thesis (Brazilian Computer Society, 2011)
• Best Undergraduate Research (top 6, Brazilian Computer Society, 2009)

Labs/Teams: Engages in interdisciplinary projects at Rice, focusing on environmental informatics and network science. His GitHub repositories include work on trajectory compression, anomaly detection, and spectral algorithms for graph cuts.