PeopleofSuperintelligence

Researcher

Leman Akoglu

Leman Akoglu is a machine learning researcher at Carnegie Mellon University whose work focuses on graph mining and the detection of anomalies and fraud. After a computer science degree at Bilkent in 2007, she coauthored OddBall in 2010 to find unusual nodes in large social networks. She completed a CMU doctorate under Christos Faloutsos in 2012 and held an assistant professorship at Stony Brook before joining Heinz College in 2016. Her later papers introduced FoMo-0D in 2024 and OUTFORMER in 2026, foundation models for detecting outliers in tabular data. She directs the Data Analytics Techniques Algorithms (DATA) Lab at Heinz and became an Amazon Scholar in 2023.

Works
194
Citations
9,371
h-index
44
Badges

Publication numbers from OpenAlex, as of 27 October 2026.

Timeline

  1. 2007

    A degree at Bilkent

    She earns a bachelor's degree in computer science from Bilkent University in Turkey in 2007.

  2. 2010

    The OddBall algorithm

    With Mary McGlohon and Christos Faloutsos, she coauthors OddBall: Spotting Anomalies in Weighted Graphs in 2010. The paper presents fast algorithms to find unusual nodes in large social networks and wins the PAKDD 2010 best paper award.

  3. 2012

    Doctorate and Stony Brook

    She completes a PhD in Carnegie Mellon's Computer Science Department in 2012, advised by Christos Faloutsos. In 2012, she becomes an assistant professor in Stony Brook University's Department of Computer Science.

  4. 2013–2015

    Army and NSF awards

    She receives the US Army Research Office Young Investigator award in 2013. In 2015, she receives a National Science Foundation CAREER award.

  5. 2016

    Joining Heinz College

    In 2016, she joins Carnegie Mellon University's Heinz College of Information Systems and Public Policy as an assistant professor.

  6. April 2021

    The SDM/IBM research award

    She receives the SDM/IBM Early Career Data Mining Research Award from the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics in April 2021.

  7. August 2023

    An Amazon Scholar role

    In August 2023, she begins research and collaborations as an Amazon Scholar.

  8. 2024

    FoMo-0D for outlier detection

    In 2024, she coauthors FoMo-0D with Yuchen Shen and Haomin Wen. Pretrained on synthetic data, the foundation model identifies outliers in tabular data without labeled examples, further training or hyperparameter tuning for a new task.

  9. 2026

    The OUTFORMER model

    With Xueying Ding, Haomin Wen and Simon Klüttermann, she coauthors From Zero to Hero in 2026, introducing OUTFORMER. The model trains on synthetic labeled datasets and uses a new task's training data as context to identify outliers.

  10. As of October 2026

    Associate professor at Heinz

    In October 2026, she is the Heinz College Dean's Associate Professor of Information Systems at Carnegie Mellon University and directs the Data Analytics Techniques Algorithms (DATA) Lab. Her research focuses on graph mining and anomaly, fraud and event detection.

Career

  1. NowCarnegie Mellon UniversityDean's Associate Professor of Information Systems, Director, Data Analytics Techniques Algorithms (DATA) Lab
  2. 2023–2026AmazonAmazon Scholar
  3. 2012–2016Stony Brook UniversityAssistant Professor

Education

  1. 2012Carnegie Mellon UniversityPhD
  2. 2007Bilkent UniversityBachelor's degree in computer science

From the biography and OpenAlex affiliations (the years of papers that list the organization), so some years are approximate.

Checked career sources: engineering.cmu.edu.

Colleagues

People named in this biography, and people with dated positions at the same organization in the same years.

Sources and credits

Photo: We have no published photo of Leman Akoglu yet. Send us a free-licensed photo.

  1. Leman Akoglu - Carnegie Mellon Database Group db.cs.cmu.edu. Checked 27 October 2026.
  2. Leman Akoglu and Mary McGlohon win the ‘best paper’ award at PAKDD 2010 - Carnegie Mellon Database Group db.cs.cmu.edu. Checked 27 October 2026.
  3. Christos Faloutsos awarded PAKDD’s “Most Influential Paper Award” - Amazon Science amazon.science. Checked 27 October 2026.
  4. Leman Akoglu | Carnegie Mellon University Computer Science Department csd.cmu.edu. Checked 27 October 2026.
  5. Leman Akoglu | Carnegie Mellon University's Heinz College heinz.cmu.edu. Checked 27 October 2026.
  6. Leman Akoglu - College of Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University engineering.cmu.edu. Checked 27 October 2026.
  7. Leman Akoglu, Heinz College andrew.cmu.edu. Checked 27 October 2026.
  8. [2409.05672] FoMo-0D: A Foundation Model for Zero-shot Tabular Outlier Detection arxiv.org. Checked 27 October 2026.
  9. [2602.03018] From Zero to Hero: Advancing Zero-Shot Foundation Models for Tabular Outlier Detection arxiv.org. Checked 27 October 2026.