Dr. Esra Akbas, Director of DELab, has been awarded a $174K National Science Foundation (NSF) grant to carry on fundamental research for the project entitled “Structure-aware Graph Compressing: From Algorithms to Applications”.This project aims at developing novel graph compression (summarization) methodologies that facilitate efficient analysis of large graphs and advancing a wide spectrum of graph-related applications. This project will: 1) explore the spatial locality property of graphs by taking the structural information from different aspects, including similarity of nodes and cohesiveness of subgraphs; 2) develop the corresponding novel structure-aware compression methods to tackle the challenges brought by large real-world networks; and 3) build more tailored architectures with proposed compression methods for various problems, including network embedding and community search and evaluate them on real-world applications such as link prediction, node classification, anomaly detection, and community detection. Its outcomes will be disseminated through publications, tutorials, workshops, as well as open-source tools, code, and datasets.