Hello!! I am Amit Goyal, a final year PhD student in Department of Computer Science in University of British Columbia (UBC). My supervisor is Dr. Laks V. S. Lakshmanan. I completed my Bachelors in Computer Science from Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay (IITB). My PhD thesis focus on understanding Influence propagation in Social Networks and how it can be leveraged in various applications like Viral Marketing.

In addition to PhD, I am also working on a startup -- Namkis. Besides me, our team consists of three people -- Harman Bajwa (MBA from Sauder School, UBC), Pooja Mehra (MBA from Sauder School, UBC) and Naresh Kolloju (Masters student, Computer Science, UBC; B.Tech from IIT Bombay).

Research Interests:

1. Data Mining
2. Influence Propagation in Social Networks
3. Recommender Systems
4. Algorithms

Publications:


Amit Goyal, Francesco Bonchi, Laks V. S. Lakshmanan, Suresh VenkatasubramanianOn Minimizing Budget and Time in Influence Propagation over Social Networks. In Social Network Analysis and Mining, 2012.

Smriti Bhagat, Amit Goyal, Laks V. S. Lakshmanan, Maximizing Product Adoption in Social Networks. To appear in WSDM 2012.(PDF)

Amit Goyal, Francesco Bonchi, Laks V. S. Lakshmanan, A Data-Based approach to Social Influence Maximization. To appear in PVLDB 2012. (PDF, Source Code)

Amit Goyal, Wei Lu, Laks V. S. Lakshmanan, Simpath: An Efficient Algorithm for Influence Maximization under the Linear Threshold Model. In ICDM 2011. (PDF, PPT, Source Code)

Amit Goyal, Wei Lu, Laks V. S. Lakshmanan, CELF++: Optimizing the Greedy Algorithm for Influence Maximization in Social Networks. In WWW 2011 (Companion Volume). (PDF, Source Code)

Amit Goyal, Francesco Bonchi, Laks V. S. Lakshmanan, Learning Influence Probabilities in Social Networks. In Proc. of the 3rd ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining, WSDM 2010, New York City, 2010 (PDF, PPT)

Amit Goyal, Francesco Bonchi, Laks V. S. Lakshmanan, Discovering Leaders from Community Actions. In Proc. of the 17th Conference on Information and Knowledge Management, CIKM 2008, Napa Valley, California, 2008 (PDF, PPT)

Amit Goyal, Francesco Bonchi, Laks V. S. Lakshmanan, Byung-Won On, Gurumine: a Pattern Mining System for Discovering Leaders and Tribes. In Proc. of the 25th Intl. Conference on Data Engineering, ICDE 2009, Shanghai, China, 2009 (Demo Paper) (PDF)

Other Interests/Activities:
1. Procrastination and Sleeping :)
2. Religion, Theology and Metaphysics
3. Reading ancient Indian literature like Upanishads and Puranas
4. Palmistry
5. Cricket, TT, carrom, chess, badminton, cards

Email: goyal4u[AT]gmail[DOT]com, goyal[AT]cs[DOT]ubc[DOT]ca
Phone no: 778-558-0733. US callers can also call me at 408-728-6445. This US number is mapped to my cell phone (Thanks to grandcentral.com)