Presentation: Graph Databases – Overview and Applications

In April 2014, I gave a presentation at my Alma Mater, the University of Winnipeg: Graph Databases – Overview and Applications

It was presented to the faculty and students of the Applied Computer Science Master’s program.

Most had not seen graph databases before. However, I expect that some of them will be using graphs in the near future.  🙂

A PDF of the presentation can be found here:

Analyzing Keywords in Enron’s Email

You probably can’t read all the 252K email messages in the Enron email dataset by yourself.

But with SQL it’s easy to search for keywords, like “Special Purpose Entity”, “Bankrupt”, “Fraud”, “Shutdown”,  “Talking Points”, “FERC” and so on. They begin to reveal what really went on inside the minds at Enron.

TALKING POINTS:

Many Enron employees took MBA courses at UC Berkeley HAAS Business School.

Since the Enron bankruptcy, classes at UC Berkeley School Of Information began to analyze Enron’s emails, as early as 2004. Like this one: http://courses.ischool.berkeley.edu/i290-2/f04/assignments/a4_solutions/qu_poon.doc.

In this document, they search for “Talking Points“: an especially persuasive point helping to support an argument or discussion.

Enron – A Few Good Guys

Sherron Watkins:

Sherron Watkins

Sherron Watkins is the former Vice President of Enron Corporation who alerted then-CEO Ken Lay in August 2001 to accounting irregularities within the company, warning him that Enron ‘might implode in a wave of accounting scandals. From her website:
sherronwatkins.com/sherronwatkins/Sherrons_Bio.html

At the House Hearing on Enron, Sherron Watkins said:
“I wish we could get caught. We are such a crooked company.” Sherron Watkins former Vice President of Corporate Development at Enron

In the emails made public, what can we find about Sherron Watkins? Unfortunately, not as much as we might hope.

There is no entry like “Watkin” in the table: employeelist. Again, like other senior executives, there are not many emails from or to Sherron Watkins.

In the entire email set, where the sender or receiver is sherron.watkins@enron.com, there are only 24 unique messages. If a group by is done on the sender and receiver, there are only 46 unique messages.

So, does this indicate:
– Sherron Watkins did not email much
– her assistants did her email for her
– the email list has been overly sanitized
– or something else?

If we search the body of the messsages, we find Sherron Watkins in emails that she sent, that others then forwarded along. So, I would tend to think that the email list is a very small subset of actual email data. What we do find is rather interesting.

Sherron’s Resentment In The Behavior Of Others:  

Enron Email Analysis – Persons Of Interest

Persons Of Interest:

Continuing my analysis of the Enron scandal, I looked at some of the key players in the Enron scandal.

Kenneth Lay

A good list of who played which position at Enron is at:
http://enrondata.org/assets/edo_enron-custodians-data.html
and at:
http://www.infosys.tuwien.ac.at/staff/dschall/email/enron-employees.txt

What can we discover about Enron’s People Of Interest by analyzing their email with SQL?  Among other things, there was some very abusive management at Enron.

Person Of Interest – Andrew Fastow:

Interestingly, there is very little in the emails regarding Andrew Fastow, the CFO of Enron, who was one of the main culprits. He is rather absent in this dataset.

Analyzing Enron Email Metadata Using SQL

enron-logo

What can we discover analyzing Enron emails using SQL? Quite a bit actually.

The Enron scandal in 2001 was huge.  As part of the discovery process, prosecutors started looking at emails to find evidence to convict the guilty. These email sets have since been made public.

Recently, I downloaded a set of Enron emails from USC:
http://www.isi.edu/~adibi/Enron/Enron.htm
and installed them into a MYSQL database.

There were over 252K email messages, sent to over 2 million recipients.

+-----------------+
| Tables_in_enron |      Count
+-----------------+
| employeelist    |        151
| message         |    252,759
| recipientinfo   |  2,064,442
| referenceinfo   |     54,778
+-----------------+

Analyzing the emails produced some very interesting findings about what went on inside Enron!

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