Polo Chau works as a kind of detective, sniffing out fraud in online auctions using sophisticated data mining techniques. His specialty: detecting suspicious patterns in graphs. A PhD student in Carnegie Mellon's Machine Learning Department, within the School of Computer Science, Chau conducts research that can be applied in many settings but is particularly useful in uncovering scams. His work earned him a coveted Symantec Research Labs Graduate Fellowship in both 2008 and 2009—an award given to outstanding PhD and master of science students, which covers 100 percent of the recipient's tuition and fees.
—Elizabeth May