Verisign Labs
Talented, Collaborative and Dedicated

The Verisign Labs team brings a tremendous breadth of expertise and talent.

Andrew West

Principal Research Scientist


Biography

Dr. Andrew G. West is a principal research scientist on Verisign’s strategy and analytics team.

In this role, he applies deep learning, machine learning, forecasting, and other data science techniques across Verisign's domain name business and associated marketing efforts. Andrew publishes research and pursues intellectual property as an affiliate of Verisign Labs. He joined Verisign in 2013 after completing his Ph.D. at the University of Pennsylvania.

His recent work has focused on: (1) leveraging deep learning for generative and classification tasks, (2) modeling and forecasting many aspects of the domain name lifecycle, (3) applying big data techniques to internet-scale quantification problems, and (4) designing crowd-sourced data collection for market measurement and competitive intelligence. Complementing these are broader research interests that include reputation management, metadata analysis, email/Web 2.0 abuse, underground economies, behavioral profiling, and internet virality. This skill set has been demonstrated externally across 35+ peer-reviewed publications, and more internally facing, by bringing emergent techniques to bear on business problems.

Prior to Verisign, his dissertation research investigated security in "open collaboration" applications. His work examined how user-generated content and collaborative semantics change how abuses manifest and can be detected. This yielded tools still in use, notably STiki, which has been used to remove 1.1+ million damaging revisions from Wikipedia. Media outlets such as the Chronicle of Higher Education and Gizmodo have recognized his contributions, and he remains an active volunteer in the Wikipedia community.

Andrew is in active service to the academic and professional communities as a reviewer/editor for multiple conferences and journals.

Andrew earned a doctorate in computer and information science and a master’s degree in engineering in computer and information science from the University of Pennsylvania. He earned a Bachelor of Science in computer science from Washington and Lee University.

Publications

Andrew G. West
Analyzing the Keystroke Dynamics of Web Identifiers, WebSci '17: Proceedings of the Ninth International ACM Web Science Conference
2017
Publications / Papers
James M. Heilman, Andrew G. West
Wikipedia and Medicine: Quantifying Readership, Editors, and the Significance of Natural Language, Journal of Medical Internet Research
2015
Publications / Papers
Andrew G. West, Adam J. Aviv
Measuring Privacy Disclosures in URL Query Strings. IEEE Internet Computing
2014
Publications / Papers
Aziz Mohaisen, Omar Alrawi, Andrew G. West, Allison Mankin
Chatter: Exploring Classification of Malware based on the Order of Events, IEEE CNS '14
2014
Publications / Papers
Andrew G. West, Aziz Mohaisen
Metadata-driven Threat Classification of Network Endpoints Appearing in Malware. Proceedings of DIMVA '14
2014
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Ahmed Kosba, Aziz Mohaisen, Andrew G. West, and Trevor Tonn
ADAM: Automated Detection and Attribution of Malicious Webpages. WISA 2014
2014
Publications / Papers
Andrew G. West, Adam J. Aviv
On the Privacy Concerns of URL Query Strings. Proceedings of W2SP '14
2014
Publications / Papers
Aziz Mohaisen, Ahmed E. Kosba, Andrew G. West, Trevor Tonn
ADAM: Automated Detection and Attribution of Malicious Webpages. IEEE CNS 2013
2013
Publications / Papers
Jian Chang, Krishna K. Venkatasburamanian, Andrew G. West, Sampath Kannan, Insup Lee, Boon Thau Loo, Oleg Sokolsky
AS-CRED: Reputation and Alert Service for Inter-domain Routing. IEEE Systems, special issue on Security and Privacy of Complex Systems
2013
Publications / Papers
Jian Chang, Krishna K. Venkatasburamanian, Andrew G. West, Insup Lee
Analyzing and Defending Against Web-based Malware. ACM Computing Surveys
2013
Publications / Papers
Aziz Mohaisen, Omar Alrawi, Andrew G. West, Allison Mankin
Babble: Identifying Malware by Its Dialects. IEEE CNS 2013
2013
Publications / Papers
Andrew G. West
Damage Detection and Mitigation in Open Collaboration Applications. University of Pennsylvania
2013
Publications / Papers
Andrew G. West, Insup Lee
Open Wikis and the Protection of Institutional Welfare. Research Bulletin, EDUCAUSE Center for Applied Research
2012
Publications / Papers
Andrew G. West, Pedram Hayati, Vidyasagar Potdar, Insup Lee
Spamming for Science: Active Measurement in Web 2.0 Abuse Research. Proceedings of WECSR '12
2012
Publications / Papers
Andrew G. West, Insup Lee
Towards Content-driven Reputation for Collaborative Code Repositories. WikiSym '12
2012
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Andrew G. West, Jian Chan, Krishna K. Venkatasubramanian, Insup Lee
Trust in Collaborative Web Applications. Future Generation Computer Systems, special section on Trusting Software Behavior
2012
Publications / Papers
Jian Chang, Krishna Venkatasubramanian, Andrew G. West, Sampath Kannan, Boon Thau Loo, Oleg Sokolsky, Insup Lee
AS-TRUST: A Trust Quantification Scheme for Autonomous Systems in BGP. Proceedings of TRUST '11
2011
Publications / Papers
Andrew G. West, Avantika Agrawal, Phillip Baker, Brittney Exline, Insup Lee
Autonomous Link Spam Detection in Purely Collaborative Environments. Proceedings of WikiSym '11
2011
Publications / Papers
Andrew G. West, Jian Chang, Krishna Venkatasubramanian, Oleg Sokolsky, Insup Lee
Link Spamming Wikipedia for Profit. Proceedings of CEAS '11
2011
Publications / Papers
Andrew G. West, Insup Lee
Multilingual Vandalism Detection using Language-Independent & Ex Post Facto Evidence. PAN-CLEF '11
2011
Publications / Papers
Jian Chang, Krishna K. Venkatasubramanian, Andrew G. West, Sampath Kannan, Oleg Sokolsky, Myuhng Joo Kim, Insup Lee
ToMaTo: A Trustworthy Code Mashup Development Tool. Proceedings of MASHUPS '11
2011
Publications / Papers
Andrew G. West, Insup Lee
Towards the Effective Temporal Association Mining of Spam Blacklists. Proceedings of CEAS '11
2011
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Andrew G. West, Insup Lee
What Wikipedia Deletes: Characterizing Dangerous Collaborative Content. Proceedings of WikiSym '11
2011
Publications / Papers
B. Thomas Adler, Luca de Alfaro, Santiago M. Mola-Velasco, Paolo Rosso, Andrew G. West
Wikipedia Vandalism Detection: Combining Natural Language, Metadata, and Reputation Features. Proceedings of CICLing '11
2011
Publications / Papers
Andrew G. West, Insup Lee, Sampath Kannan, Oleg Sokolsky
An Evaluation Framework for Reputation Management Systems. Trust Modeling and Management in Digital Environments: From Social Concept to System Development
2010
Publications / Papers
Andrew G. West, Sampath Kannan, Insup Lee
Detecting Wikipedia Vandalism via Spatio-Temporal Analysis of Revision Metadata. Proceedings of EUROSEC '10
2010
Publications / Papers
Andrew G. West, Sampath Kannan, Insup Lee
STiki: An Anti-Vandalism Tool for Wikipedia Using Spatio-Temporal Analysis of Revision Metadata. Formal demonstration and proceedings of WikiSym '10
2010
Publications / Papers
Andrew G. West, Adam J. Aviv, Jian Chang, Insup Lee
Spam Mitigation using Spatio-Temporal Reputations from Blacklist History. Proceedings of ACSAC '10
2010
Publications / Papers
Andrew G. West, Adam J. Aviv, Jian Chang, Vinayak S. Prabhu, Matt Blaze, Sampath Kannan, Insup Lee, Jonathan M. Smith, Oleg Sokolsky
QuanTM: A Quantitative Trust Management System. Proceedings of EUROSEC '09
2009
Publications / Papers
Andrew G. West
Bound Optimization for Parallel Quadratic Sieving Using Large Prime Variations. Washington & Lee University
2007
Publications / Papers
Andrew G. West
Optimized Parallel Implementation of the Quadratic Sieve Factorization Algorithm. Washington and Lee Journal of Science
2007
Publications / Papers