Michael D. Porter

About

Michael D. Porter is an Associate Professor of Systems Engineering with a joint appointment at the Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia. 

Dr. Porter's research focuses on event prediction, pattern and anomaly detection, and data linkage. He has developed self-exciting point process models for processes where the occurrence of certain events can trigger a cascade of subsequent events. These models have been applied to crime, terrorism, social media, and crash data and led to a winning performance in NIJ's Real-time Crime Forecasting Challenge. Porter has also developed methodology and software for crime linkage, a type of data linkage problem where the goal is to group together unsolved crimes that were committed by the same offender(s) using the behavioral patterns obtained from crime data. 

Dr. Porter teaches courses in data science, statistics, and analytics with a particular emphasis on data-driven decision-making and reproducible research. His team has experience working with data from point processes, dynamic networks, spatial processes and GIS, time series, sensors, and social media; using methodology from data science, statistics, stochastic processes, machine learning and data mining, and analytics; to solve problems related to criminology, transportation, terrorism, defense, security, forensics, business, marketing, social media, and finance.

Prior to joining UVA in 2018, Dr. Porter was an associate professor of Applied Statistics at the University of Alabama, post-doc at North Carolina State University and SAMSI, and has industry experience as principal research scientist at DigitalGlobe/GeoEye/Spadac and project engineer at Sanford/Newell Brands.