Kunal  Punera
5200, North Lamar Blvd, Apt # B201,
Austin, TX 78751, USA
1-512-659-4925
kunal@lans.ece.utexas.edu
http://www.lans.ece.utexas.edu/~kunal/

Objective

Seeking a full time position with a research lab working on Web/Data Mining, Information Retrieval, and Machine Learning.

Research Interests

Web Data Analysis, Data Mining, Machine Learning, Information Retrieval

Education

 

Dept. of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Texas at Austin.

  • Ph.D., Computer Engineering (Dec 2004 – Aug 2007)
  • Master of Science, Computer Engineering (Aug 2002 - Dec 2004),

Major GPA:  4.0                                            Overall GPA: 3.9

Relevant Courses: Data Mining, Advanced Data Mining, Machine Learning, Web Mining, Introduction to Neural Networks, Probability and Stochastic Processes I, Information Theory, Bioinformatics, Engineering Programming Languages, Verification and Validation of Software Systems

 

Sardar Patel College of Engineering, University of Mumbai (Bombay).

  • Bachelor of Engineering, Computer Engineering, (Aug 1997 - May 2001)

Major GPA:  3.9                                            Overall GPA: 3.8

Relevant Courses: Artificial Intelligence, Database Systems, Computer Networks, Object Oriented Programming, Computer Methodology and Algorithms, Software Engineering, Structured Systems Analysis and Design

 

Publications

 

with Suju Rajan and Joydeep Ghosh, Automatic Construction of N-ary Tree based Taxonomies, 6th IEEE International Conference on Data Mining (ICDM), Dec 2006

 

with Aris Anagnostopoulos and Andrei Broder, Effective and Efficient Classification via a Search Engine Model, 15th Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM), Nov 2006

 

with Ravi Kumar and Andrew Tomkins, Hierarchical Topic Segmentation of Websites, 12th International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD), Dec 2006

 

with Joydeep Ghosh, CLUMP: a Scalable and Robust Framework for Structure Discovery, 5th IEEE International Conference on Data Mining (ICDM), Nov 2005

 

with Suju Rajan and Joydeep Ghosh, A Maximum Likelihood Framework for Integrating Taxonomies, 25th AAAI Conference, July 2005

 

with David Gibson and Andrew Tomkins, The Volume and Evolution of Web Page Templates, 14th International World Wide Web Conference (WWW), May 2005

 

with Suju Rajan and Joydeep Ghosh, Automatically Learning Document Taxonomies for Hierarchical Classification, 14th International World Wide Web Conference (WWW), May 2005

 

with Soumen Chakrabarti and Mallela Subramanyam, Accelerated focused crawling through online relevance feedback, 11th International World Wide Web Conference (WWW), May 2002

 

with Soumen Chakrabarti, Mukul Joshi, and David Pennock, The structure of broad topics on the Web, 11th International World Wide Web Conference (WWW), May 2002

 

with Soumen Chakrabarti, R. Jaju, and Mukul Joshi, Analyzing  fine-grained hypertext features for enhanced crawling and topic distillation, Data Engineering Vol. 25 No.1, pages 34-42, March 2002

 

University Research Experience

August 2002 - to date

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Aug 2003 – Jan 2004

 

 

 

 

 

 

July 2001 - June 2002

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Jan 2001 - May 2002

 

 

 

Intelligent Data Exploration and Analysis Lab (with Dr. Joydeep Ghosh)

http://www.ideal.ece.utexas.edu

Dept. of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Texas-Austin

     I am currently working in Dr. Joydeep Ghosh's research group on automatic construction, integration, and other analysis for data organized as hierarchical taxonomies.

In previous semesters I have investigated combining multiple clustering results to aid distributed and robust data mining, web usage mining for e-commerce websites, and clustering of streaming data.

 

School of Information Science (with Dr. Don Turnbull)

http://www.ischool.utexas.edu/~donturn/

University of Texas-Austin

     My research concentrated on cognitive models of user behavior on the Web. This was a continuation of my work with Dr. Ghosh on clustering customers on e-commerce websites. We were interested in being able to quantify, and eventually classify patterns of user interaction with websites.

 

Lab for Intelligent Internet Research (with Dr. Soumen Chakrabarti)

http://www.cse.iitb.ac.in/laiir/

Indian Institute of Technology-Bombay

     I worked with Dr. Soumen Chakrabarti on Hypertext Information Retrieval and Mining. My work primarily involved adapting machine learning techniques for better classification of hypertext in order to aid focused web crawlers.

 

Part Whole Relations (with Dr. R. K. Joshi)

http://www.cse.iitb.ac.in/~rkj/

Indian Institute of Technology-Bombay    

     I worked with Dr. Rushikesh Joshi on the Taxonomy of Meronymic (Part-Whole) relations. The product of the research is an improved taxonomy, which includes additional constraints introduced by us.

 

Industry Research Experience

August 2005 - to date

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

June 2004 – Aug 2004

June 2005 – Aug 2005

 

 

 

 

 

June 2003 - Aug 2003

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Yahoo! Research

http://www.research.yahoo.com

Dept. of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Texas-Austin

     For the last couple of years, Yahoo! Research has been funding my work at UT-Austin, and I have been visiting and interning with them. My research involves development of smoothing and segmentation algorithms for tree structured data and applying them to problems in webpage and website segmentation as well as page-level template (noise) detection. I have also been working on improving the speed and accuracy of query processing by exploiting correlations between query terms.

 

IBM Almaden Research Center

http://www.almaden.ibm.com/

University of Texas-Austin

     I interned for two summers with the WebFountain group which was concerned with creating a web search engine that extracted and utilized deep semantic information about entities in webpages. My research involved removal of noise due to webpage templates and fast and accurate webpage classification via the search engine model.

 

Verity Inc.,  (now acquired by Autonomy Inc.)

http://www.verity.com

     I worked with the Development and Emerging Technologies divisions to identify and test the efficacy of a new query independent score for Intranet documents. The result of this work was identification of the features and their weights which comprise the query independent score. In the course of my work I set up a Relevance Measurement Framework which was used to compare the Verity search engine with other such products or with different settings of parameters. Other by-products of this work included a way to automatically generate relevance judgments.

 

Work Experience

Jan 2004 – May 2005

 

 

 

 

 

Aug 2002 – May 2003

 

 

 

 

 

Jan 2000 - June 2001

 

 

ECE Department, The University of Texas at Austin, http://www.ece.utexas.edu/

Teaching Assistant for Data Mining

     This course teaches data mining from a machine learning perspective. I was in charge of helping the students with the assignments and various tools like WEKA and SAS. Apart from this I had regular duties like grading the assignment, presentations, and projects.

 

ECE Department, The University of Texas at Austin, http://www.ece.utexas.edu/

Teaching Assistant for Electronic Circuits I

     My responsibilities included teaching and guiding lab sessions of the Electronic Circuits I class. We used tools such as PSPICE and LabView to perform the measurement experiments. I also conducted examinations and graded the lab assignments.

 

Acquisnet Software, Bombay, http://www.acquisi.com/

Project Designer

     My work involved the complete development of web sites, from acquiring user requirements to designing the databases and overseeing the programming and deployment. In my capacity as a project designer I designed and implemented www.jyotiindia.com, www.fortpointautomotive.com and the online auction and shopping modules of www.orangefrog.com, a horizontal portal. I used technologies such as Java,

ASP, and Javascript during this stint.

Details of Selected Projects

 

Clustering customers on an e-commerce website (with Dr. Ghosh)

This work was done on behalf of an e-commerce website which provided us with web-usage data. I used a mixture of Markov models to model users on the website and was able to observe distinct patterns of browsing and purchasing behavior. This data was used to identify “trouble” spots where users tended to prematurely exit the purchasing process or seemed disoriented. The website engineers finally used the data to streamline the purchase paths and to dynamically provide support on the website.

 

Scalable web crawler (joint work with Dr. Soumen Chakrabarti)

This work was performed during the stint at the Lab for Intelligent Internet Research at I.I.T.-Bombay. We implemented a simple, configurable, highly scalable crawler written in ANSI C++. Unlike the w3c-libwww, we took care to overlap DNS lookups with HTTP transfers and handle multiple DNS servers. The crawler is implemented as a set of classes which can be extended to perform the specific tasks that the user has in mind. The code is now part of iVia project (http://infomine.ucr.edu/iVia/)

 

Design of CRSM Simulator (under Dr. S. Ramesh)

The Project was performed at the Indian Institute of Technology - Bombay under            Prof. (Dr.) S. Ramesh of the CSE department. The project involved the development of Editor and Simulator a graphical language called Communicating Reactive State Machines. C.R.S.M. is used to model distributed reactive controllers. The design was prepared using the UML while the implementation was done on the Java platform.

Computer Skills

 

Programming Languages: C, C++, Java, Perl, Visual Basic, ASP, Javascript

DBMS:                                 IBM DB2, MS Access, Berkeley DB

Tools and Libraries:           WEKA, MATLAB, SNNS, UML

Operating Systems:            Linux /Unix, Windows (95-XP), and DOS

Markup Languages:           HTML, XML, Latex

Non-Technical Skills

 

Organizational and leadership skills: I was the ‘Head Boy’ of Naval Public School (high school) in (96’-97’). I captained the soccer team in both my high school and undergraduate institution. I also organized various technical events in SPACE, our inter-college festival. I honed my interpersonal skills and ability to work in a team at Acquisnet Software and later in Intelligent Internet research group at I.I.T.-Bombay.

Extra-Curricular: I captained my undergraduate college’s soccer team. I also represented my college in badminton and table tennis. I learnt to play the guitar for many years.

Accomplishments

 

Merit Scholarship Award, Ministry of Human Resources, Govt. of India, 1997

'Dhirubhai Ambani Foundation' scholarship (1997-2001) for being placed 9th in the All India Senior School Certificate Examination (AISSCE) in the state of Maharashtra.

Merit certificate awarded by CBSE for being placed in the top 0.1% of all scoring students (approx. 2,500,000) from all over India in the AISSCE.

'Indian Naval Benevolent Association' scholarship (1997,1998,1999,2000).

'Best Senior Student of the year 1995-1996 in Naval Public School. Also elected 'Head Boy' in the academic year 1996-1997.

Merit Certificate awarded by 'All Goa Mathematics Teachers Association' for being placed in the 4th in the state level Math Competitive Test in year 1993.

 

Employability Status: Student Visa (F1).

 

 

References: Available on request