Endowed Chair for E-Commerce
J.B. Speed School of Engineering
Olfa Nasraoui, Ph.D. is an associate professor in the computer science and computer engineering department. She also is director of the Knowledge Discovery and Web Mining Laboratory at U of L’s Speed School of Engineering.
Her research explores computer and machine-learning methods of mining information from massive data sets, including text and web data. In addition to her work on computational intelligence, Nasraoui works on stream data mining, web mining and web personalization -- topics identified as key areas of growth and technology for e-businesses. She was an early contributor in setting a computational framework for web usage data mining based on soft clustering and later based on robust clustering. Her work in the area of data mining is inspired by natural evolution and the natural immune system, and has been widely-recognized and well-cited.
Recipient of a National Science Foundation Career award for outstanding young scientists in 2002, she is principal investigator on multiyear NSF grants related to web usage mining and personalization, and to mining solar images to support astrophysics research. She has NASA and NSF funding for research developing scalable and automated mining and retrieval methods to sift through large online databases in search of images with massive coronal ejections called solar loops. From 2004-2006 she was also involved in a U.S. Navy subcontract with a local business to convert a web site to a personalized knowledge portal.
She recently was chosen as a member of Academic Key’s “Who’s Who in Engineering Education” and "Who's Who in America." Nasraoui has more than 90 refereed publications, including 20 journal papers and book chapters and eight edited volumes. She has served on organizing and program committees of several conferences and workshops, and is a member of several professional organizations, including the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), IEEE Women in Engineering and the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM).
Nasraoui earned her doctorate in computer engineering and computer science at the University of Missouri-Columbia, where she also earned a master of science degree in electrical engineering and bachelor’s degrees in electrical engineering and in computer engineering.
Prior to joining U of L in 2004, she was at the University of Memphis and had been a visiting research scholar at Colorado School of Mines.