Contact Information

Biography

Dr. Patrick Juola has been a professor at Duquesne University since 1998 and was recently inducted into the university’s Research Hall of Fame in recognition of his outstanding research achievements and success in securing funding. His work over more than a decade has focused on applying computational methods to solve practical problems in the humanities, with a particular emphasis on authorship attribution through stylometry—the study and measurement of writing style.

Dr. Juola’s research has led to a range of notable applications, including identifying J.K. Rowling’s use of a pen name to write The Cuckoo’s Calling, providing expert testimony in judicial misconduct cases such as Chevron Corp. v. Donziger, and assisting a refugee in remaining in the United States through Federal Immigration Court. Some of the software he has developed is available under an open-source license.

The guiding insight of Dr. Juola’s research is that while there are many ways to express the same idea, individuals develop habitual patterns in their choices of words and style. By analyzing these habitual patterns across different texts, it becomes possible to identify authorship with a high degree of confidence.

Dr. Juola earned his Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Colorado at Boulder in 1995 and subsequently completed a three-year postdoctoral fellowship in the Department of Experimental Psychology at Oxford University. He has been a member of the Mathematics and Computer Science Department at Duquesne University since 1998, where he currently serves as Professor of Computer Science.

Education

  • B.S. (Electrical Engineering and Mathematics) The Johns Hopkins University (1987)
  • M.S. (Computer Science)  The University of Colorado at Boulder (1991)
  • M.S. (Cognitive Science) The University of Colorado at Boulder (1993)
  • Ph.D. (Computer Science) The University of Colorado at Boulder (1995)

 

Research Interests

  • Authorship attribution and stylometry – analyzing writing style to determine the likely author of a text.

  • Computational linguistics and text analysis – applying algorithms to understand language patterns and textual structures.

  • Digital forensics and computational methods for legal cases – using computational techniques in courts and investigative contexts.

  • Humanities computing – leveraging technology to solve practical problems in literature, history and other humanities disciplines.

  • Open-source software development for text analysis – creating tools like JGAAP for public use in research and applied projects.

 

School

Teaching Portfolio

Courses Taught (Graduate Level):

  • CPMA 515 (Advanced Discrete Mathematics)
  • CPMA 531 (Programming Language: Java)
  • CPMA 532 (Data Structures)
  • CPMA 535 (Computer Systems)
  • CPMA 535 (Software Engineering)
  • CPMA 564 (Cryptology)
  • CPMA 580 (Artificial Intelligence/Cognitive Science)
  • CPMA 585 (Computer Security)
  • GRBUS 462 (Topics in Digital Forensics)

Courses Taught (Undergraduate Level):

  • COSC 100 (Elements of Computer Science)
  • COSC 101 (Introduction to Visual Basic)
  • COSC 150 (Computer Programming: C++)
  • COSC 220 (Computer Organization and Assembly Language)
  • COSC 210 (Data Structures)
  • COSC 325W (Operating Systems and Computer Architecture)
  • COSC 410 (Artificial Intelligence)
  • COSC 425 (Computer Graphics)
  • COSC 435 (Theory of Programming Languages)
  • COSC 450 (Computer Networks)
  • COSC 460 (Computer Security)
  • COSC 494 (SPTPC: Neural Networks)
  • COSC 495 (SPTPC: Authorship Attribution)
  • Juola, Patrick. "The Rowling case: A proposed standard analytic protocol for authorship questions." Digital Scholarship in the Humanities 30, no. suppl_1 (2015): i100-i113.
  • Fridman, Lex, Ariel Stolerman, Sayandeep Acharya, Patrick Brennan, Patrick Juola, Rachel Greenstadt, and Moshe Kam. "Multi-modal decision fusion for continuous authentication." Computers & Electrical Engineering 41 (2015): 142-156.
  • Stamatatos, Efstathios, Walter Daelemans, Ben Verhoeven, Martin Potthast, Benno Stein, Patrick Juola, Miguel A. Sanchez-Perez, and Alberto Barrón-Cedeño. "Overview of the author identification task at PAN 2014." In CLEF 2014 Evaluation Labs and Workshop Working Notes Papers, Sheffield, UK, 2014, pp. 1-21. 2014.
  • Juola, Patrick. "How a computer program helped reveal JK Rowling as author of A Cuckoo’s Calling." Scientific American 20 (2013).
  • Fridman, Alex, Ariel Stolerman, Sayandeep Acharya, Patrick Brennan, Patrick Juola, Rachel Greenstadt, and Moshe Kam. "Decision fusion for multimodal active authentication." IT Professional 15, no. 4 (2013): 29-33.
  • Noecker Jr, John, Michael Ryan, and Patrick Juola. "Psychological profiling through textual analysis." Literary and Linguistic Computing 28, no. 3 (2013): 382-387.
  • Juola, Patrick. "Using the Google N-Gram corpus to measure cultural complexity." Literary and linguistic computing 28,no. 4 (2013): 668-675.
  • Juola, Patrick, and Efstathios Stamatatos. "Overview of the Author Identification Task at PAN 2013." CLEF (Working Notes) 1179 (2013).
  • Juola, Patrick. "Stylometry and immigration: A case study." JL & Pol'y 21 (2012): 287.
  • Juola, Patrick. "Detecting stylistic deception." In Proceedings of the Workshop on Computational Approaches to Deception Detection, pp. 91-96. Association for Computational Linguistics, 2012.
  • Juola, Patrick. "Large-scale experiments in authorship attribution." English Studies 93, no. 3 (2012): 275-283.
  • Juola, Patrick. "An Overview of the Traditional Authorship Attribution Subtask." In CLEF (Online Working Notes/Labs/Workshop). 2012.
  • Argamon, Shlomo, and Patrick Juola. "Overview of the international authorship identification competition at PAN-2011." In CLEF (NotebookPapers/Labs/Workshop). 2011.
  • Juola, Patrick, and Darren Vescovi. "Empirical evaluation of authorship obfuscation using JGAAP." In Proceedings of the 3rd ACM workshop on Artificial Intelligence and Security, pp. 14-18. ACM, 2010.
  • Juola, Patrick. "Killer applications in digital humanities." Literary and Linguistic Computing 23,no. 1 (2008): 73-83.
  • Juola, Patrick. "Authorship attribution." Foundations and Trends® in Information Retrieval 1, no. 3 (2008): 233-334
  • Juola, Patrick. "Assessing linguistic complexity." Language complexity: Typology, contact, change (2008):89-108.
  • Juola, Patrick. "Authorship attribution for electronic documents." In IFIP International Conference on Digital Forensics, pp. 119-130. Springer, Boston, MA, 2006.
  • Juola, Patrick, John Sofko, and Patrick Brennan. "A prototype for authorship attribution studies." Literary and Linguistic Computing 21, no. 2 (2006): 169-178.
  • Juola, Patrick, and R. Harald Baayen. "A controlled-corpus experiment in authorship identification by cross-entropy." Literary andLinguistic Computing 20, no. Suppl (2005): 59-67.
  • Juola, Patrick. "Ad-hoc authorship attribution competition." In Proceedings of the Joint Conference of the Association for Computers and the Humanities and the Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing, pp. 175-176. 2004.
  • Juola, Patrick. "The time course of language change." Computers and the Humanities 37, no. 1 (2003): 77-96.
  • Juola, Patrick. "Document categorization and evaluation via cross-entrophy." U.S. Patent 6,397,205, issued May 28, 2002.
  • Plunkett, Kim, and Patrick Juola. "A connectionist model of English past tense and plural morphology." Cognitive Science 23, no. 4 (1999): 463-490.
  • Juola, Patrick. "Cross-entropy and linguistic typology." In Proceedings of the joint conferences on new methods in language processing and computational natural language learning, pp. 141-149. Association for Computational Linguistics, 1998.
  • Juola, Patrick. "Measuring linguistic complexity: The morphological tier." Journal of Quantitative Linguistics 5, no. 3 (1998): 206-213.
  • Juola, Patrick. "What can we do with small corpora? Document categorization via cross-entropy." In Proceedings of an Interdisciplinary Workshop on Similarity and Categorization, Department of Artificial Intelligence, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK. 1997.
  • Juola, Patrick. "Whole-word phonetic distances and the PGPfone alphabet." In Proceeding of Fourth International Conference on SpokenLanguage Processing. ICSLP'96, vol. 1, pp. 98-101. IEEE, 1996.
  • Kumar, Vijay, Anton Dahbura, Fred Fischer, and Patrick Juola. "An approach for the yield enhancement of programmable gate arrays." In 1989 IEEE International Conference on Computer-Aided Design. Digest of Technical Papers, pp. 226-229. IEEE, 1989.
  • 2018: Juola, P. & Riddell, A., SaTC: CORE Small: Collaborative: Defending Against Authorship Attribution Attacks, Principal Investigator, GOV-National Science Foundation (NSF).
  • 2014: Juola, P. Direct Assessment of Authorial Likelihood Using Bayes' Theorem and Monte Carlo Simulation, Principal Investigator, Innovation Works.
  • 2012: Stowell, D. & Juola, P., Is That You, Mr. Lincoln?: Applying Authorship Attribution to the Early Political Writings of Abraham Lincoln ($50,000.00), GOV-National Endowment for the Humanities.
  • 2010: Juola, P., SDCI Data: Improvement: Java Graphical Authorship Attribution Program (JGAAP) ($1,622,036.00), GOV-National Science Foundation (NSF).
  • 2009: Juola, P., Conjecture Generation ($3,500.00), Wimmer Family Foundation.
  • 2008: Juola, P. & Argamon, S., CRI: CRD: Collaborative Research: Community Resources for Authorship Attribution Research ($58,202.00), GOV-National Science Foundation (NSF).
  • 2007: Juola, P., SDCI Data New: A Modular Software Framework for Evaluation, Testing, and Cross-Fertilization of Authorship Attribution Techniques ($212,000.00), GOV-National Science Foundation (NSF).
  • 2007: Juola, P., A Machine-Aided Back-of-the-Book Indexing System ($131,465.00), GOV-National Endowment for the Humanities.
  • 2006: Juola, P., Wimmer Textbook Writing Proposal: Six Septembers ($3,500.00), Wimmer Family Foundation.
  • 2003: Simon, D. & Juola, P., Acquisition of a Beowulf Cluster for Research and Education in the Computational Sciences, GOV-National Science Foundation (NSF).
  • 2003: Juola, P., A Model of Aphasia using Dictionary-Derived Natural Language Semantics, Oxford University Press.  Supported by provision of research corpora from the Digital Reference library.
  • 2002: Juola, P., Wimmer Textbook Writing Proposal: A Virtual Assembly, Wimmer Family Foundation.
    Funded for one course released time.
  • 2002: Juola, P. & Levine, S., Interdisciplinary Teaching Development, MATH 320: Topics in Mathematics ($5,000.00), Wimmer Family Foundation.
  • 1999: Juola, P., Measuring Linguistic Complexity ($2,500.00), NEH Internal Grant.

National:

  • Founder and Director of Research, J Computing, Inc. (2010 - Present). A Pennsylvania-based startup specializing in forensic text analysis.
  • Adjunct Scientist, Human Language Technology Center of Excellence, the Johns Hopkins University (2008 - Present).
  • Visiting Scientist, CERT/CC, Carnegie Mellon University (1999 - 2001).
  • Staff Scientist, PGP, Inc. (1995 - 2001).
  • Software Engineer, Brain and Cognitive Sciences Dept., MIT (1990 - 1990).
  • Technical Consultant, AT&T Bell Laboratories (1987 - 1990).

International:

  • CIRCA Scholar, Canadian Institute for Research Computing in the Arts, University of Alberta (2011 - Present).
  • Contributing Editor, PCSense Magazine (1995 - 1997).
  • NSF Fellow, Electrotechnical Laboratory (1991 - 1991).

Juola Research Project

A police officer examines a ransom note. An airline receives an anonymous email bomb threat. A student turns in a suspiciously unoriginal essay. So who really wrote them? How can you tell?

For the past 36 months, Dr. Patrick Juola has been leading an authorship attribution study in hopes of creating software that can help authorities determine who wrote what. “It’s not just a legal issue,” said Juola, associate professor of computer science at Duquesne University. “It’s also important for historians. Our research goal is to enable a computer to look at a piece of text and say, ‘Yes, this play was written by Shakespeare’ or ‘Yes, this ransom note was written by a man in his early 40s.’”

To date, the National Science Foundation has awarded Juola with over $300,000 to support the project and he anticipates receiving a third wave of funding in the near future. Juola’s team includes James Overly and Darren Vescovi, both graduate students in the university’s Computational Mathematics program, and computer science undergraduates Peter Rutenbar and Sara Ali.

According to Juola, there are millions of tiny idiosyncrasies in our speech and text that offer telltale clues about who we are. For instance, you’re at a fancy dinner party with a formal setting of silverware in front of you. Is the salad fork “at” the left, “on” the left or on the “left-hand side”? “How you answer that question says something about who you are versus somebody else,” said Juola. “Authorship attribution also looks at spelling variations, grammar variations, and even what prepositions people like to use.”

Juola and his team plan to use their next round of funding to commercialize the software program they’re developing. “We’ve created a startup company called J Computing that will license the technology from Duquesne University, then identify a market and design a product to meet that specific need,” said Juola. “One example might be plagiarism detection in an academic context. So if you’re a high school senior thinking about plagiarizing your final paper for English class, don’t do it. We’ll catch you.”

J Computing expects to launch its first product in late 2011 in either the education or legal market. Juola’s also got his eye on the publishing industry to help validate authorship in journals.

In August, Dr. Juola presented the JGAAP authorship attribution software at ESSLLI 2010, the European Summer School in Logic, Language and Information in Copenhagen, Denmark where students and researchers from around the world gathered to attend classes and workshops. “This two-week long program attracts some of the next generation of world-class researchers,” said Juola. “So I’m delighted to bring this project to their attention, and I’ve already received some very valuable suggestions and feedback for further work.”