Hello and Welcome

I am a final-year PhD candidate at Cornell in the Computer Science Department (with a Applied Mathematics minor). I am advised by Prof. Thorsten Joachims. My research interests include Machine learning, Data Science and Web Search & Information Retrieval. Motivated by applications such as search, recommendation and educational assessment, my research aims to tackle learning problems with a human-in-the-loop. I am grateful to be supported by the Google PhD Fellowship and the Yahoo! Key Scientific Challenge Award. I am also grateful for receiving the best student paper award at SIGIR for our work on understanding the role of diversity in complex search tasks.

Before joining Cornell in 2010, I did my B.Tech in Computer Science at IIT-Bombay in the Computer Science Department from 2006 to 2010. My undergraduate research (under the guidance of Prof. Pushpak Bhattacharyya) focussed on transfer learning between different languages, by utilizing resource-rich languages such as English to help resource-poor languages such as Finnish. I also studied ways to improve the robustness of Pseudo-Relevance Feedback using negative information.

I used to study actuarial science and completed a few courses back in 2008. For leisure I tend to follow sports or work out at the gym. I also occasionally blog about Machine Learning and IR related topics. You can follow me on different social networks by following the links to the right.

Favorites

 
  • Songs: My Immortal (Evanescence), Tell Me Mechanist (Within Temptation), Bring me back to life (Evanescence), Elegy (Leaves' Eyes)
  • Musical Artists: Evanescence, Within Temptation, Sirenia, Nightwish, Leaves' Eyes
  • TV: Person of Interest, Modern Family
  • Teams: Real Madrid, Manchester United (soccer), Yankees (baseball)
  • Board Games: Hanabi, Coup, Poker
  • Video Games: Dota2, HALO Series
  • I also like to read fiction novels as well as stories from Ancient Mythologies (Greek, Roman, Egyptian, Norse ..).
  • I used to be into photography but have not had much time recently.

 

Dec 22th, 2014