Publications

Journal Papers

• M. R. Masud, B. Treves, M. Faloutsos. "Disambiguating usernames across platforms: the GeekMAN approach." Social Network Analysis and Mining (SNAM), 2024. [Link]

  A human-inspired method for detecting similar usernames across platforms, focusing on technogeek communities to identify malicious actors. [Platform]

Conference Papers

• M. R. Masud, Q. Zhang, M. Faloutsos. "MAGNET: A software-engineering view of the malware ecosystem on the GitHub network." IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining (ASONAM), 2026. New

  A software-engineering perspective on how malicious and dual-use repositories are created, forked, and evolve across the GitHub network.

• M. R. Masud, M. O. F. Rokon, Q. Zhang, M. Faloutsos. "MetaSim: A search engine for finding similar GitHub repositories." IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution (ICSME), 2024. (Short Paper) [Link] [Demo]

  A search engine that finds functionally similar GitHub repositories using interpretable metadata features. [Platform]

• N. A. Tania, M. R. Masud, M. O. F. Rokon, Q. Zhang, M. Faloutsos. "Who is Creating Malware Repositories on GitHub and Why?" The Web Conference (WWW), 2024. [Link]

  A systematic study of the origins and motivations behind the creation of malware repositories on GitHub.

• M. R. Masud, B. Treves, M. Faloutsos. "GeekMAN: Geek-oriented username Matching Across online Networks." IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining (ASONAM), 2023. [Link] [Presentation]

  A method for matching stylized usernames, improving identity linkage on technogeek datasets.

• B. Treves, M. R. Masud, M. Faloutsos. "RURLMAN: Matching Forum Users Across Platforms Using Their Posted URLs." ASONAM, 2023. [Link]

  An ensemble of traditional and emerging methods to identify off-site accounts belonging to forum users.

• B. Treves, M. R. Masud, M. Faloutsos. "URLytics: Profiling Forum Users from their Posted URLs." ASONAM, 2022. [Link]

  A URL-based user profiling mechanism to extract maximal information about forum users.

• M. O. F. Rokon, R. Islam, M. R. Masud, M. Faloutsos. "PIMan: A Comprehensive Approach for Establishing Plausible Influence among Software Repositories." ASONAM, 2022. [Link]

  A graph- and embedding-based approach to analyze the influence among software repositories.

Manuscripts Under Review

• M. R. Masud, Q. Zhang, M. Faloutsos. "RepoScope: A Multi-Granularity Query-by-Example Framework for GitHub Repository Search." Under review.

  A "search by example repository" framework spanning metadata and source-code embeddings, with visual clustering of related projects.

• M. R. Masud, A. T. Wasi, M. R. Parvez. "Reward Engineering for Reinforcement Learning in Software Tasks." Under review.

  A study of reward design for reinforcement learning applied to software engineering tasks.

Posters

• M. R. Masud, M. Faloutsos. "Unveiling A Hidden Risk: Exposing Educational but Malicious Repositories in GitHub." SoCal Data Science Day, KDD, 2023. [PDF]

  A method to identify "Educational but Malicious" GitHub repositories using large language models.