Curriculum Vitae

AREAS OF INTEREST

EDUCATION

Year	Institution	Examination	Performance
2007-Present	University of British Columbia, Vancouver	Masters in Computer Science	GPA: 3.6/4 (after 2nd term)
2001-05	Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay	Bachelor of Technology in Computer Science	CPI: 7.03/10
2001	St. John's School, Kota	High School CBSE Board	81.2%
1999	Modern School, Kota	Secondary School CBSE Board	87.4%

RESEARCH EXPERIENCE

• Mining In Social Networks
  Advisor: Prof. Laks V. S. Lakshmanan
  As a part of my Masters thesis, I work on mining interesting patterns in Social Networks. Seeing friends’ actions, users sometimes tempt to perform those actions. We look into the problem of studying the propagation of such influence, and on this basis, identifying which users are leaders when it comes to setting the trend of performing various actions. We developed a pattern mining based framework to discover leaders from community actions.
  Currently, we are working on extracting leadership qualities, i.e. what kind of qualities makes a user leader for what kind of leaders. We also study how this framework can be useful for viral marketing techniques.
• Feature Extraction, Automatic Hierarchy Building and Sentiment Analysis of Political Blogs
  Advisor: Prof. Laks V. S. Lakshmanan
  In this paper, we proposed a number of techniques for extracting features, automatic hierarchy discovery, identification of politicians and political organizations and sentiment analysis on political blogs. The objective was to automatically generate feature based summary for arbitrary political issues and what people think about them in context to related politicians.
• Automatic Online Form Filling
  At Yahoo! Bangalore (As a Senior Research Engg.)
  We developed machine learning based automated online form-filling framework for automatically completing user input controls based on previously stored information. The framework could learn and infer forms of different natures, and map them to a common schema, thus getting the semantic interpretation of different form fields irrespective of their layout, language, locale or vertical.
• Extracting Information from a Resume
  At Yahoo! Bangalore (As a Senior Research Engg.)
  We designed a framework to extract important information from a resume. E.g. name, address, skills, education and work experience details etc.
  Discovering Leaders from Community Actions
• Senior Undergraduate Thesis
Advisor: Prof. G. Sivakumar, IIT Bombay
In my senior undergraduate thesis, I looked into various aspects of bandwidth management and developed an automated framework to monitor, analyze and control the network bandwidth in an efficient manner.

PUBLICATIONS

• 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
• 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)

SCHOLASTIC ACHIEVEMENTS

• All India Rank 12 among 200,000 students in the IIT- JEE 2001.
• All India Rank 16 in National Science Talent Search Examination in 1999.
• Recipient of the National Talent Search Examination scholarship awarded by the Govt. of India. I secured 4th rank in state level exam of the same.
• Secured 9th rank in State Science Talent Search Examination scholarship awarded by the Govt. of Rajasthan, India in 1999.
• I was awarded certificate of merit, National Top 1% for National Standard Examination in Mathematics, at Higher Secondary Level (2001).
• Among the top 200 students of the country in the Indian National Physics Olympiad in 2000.
  

INDUSTRIAL EXPERIENCE

• Automatic Online Form Filling (Details Above)
• Extracting Information from a Resume (Details Above)

• I worked on enhancing performance of different parts of VCS compiler including designing and building an efficient scheduler. The work required advance knowledge in algorithms, data structures, memory management and programming.

PATENTS

• Automatic Online Form Filling Using Semantic Inference
As an employee of Yahoo! Bangalore, I have filed a patent about automatic form filling by semantic interference using advance data mining techniques.

SELECTED PROJECTS

• Online Project Management System
We developed a database system to centralize the development of software in IIT Bombay. This project involves the creation of central server that would host the past and ongoing open source projects in IIT Bombay.
• iitbedit - A Multilingual editor
I have built an open source graphical editor having Unicode support. This editor has all the basic utilities like new file, open file, save, find, replace words etc. This editor was written in C using GTK and pango libraries. One can make documents in any language in the world in iitbedit, saves it and print it. I have also made my own keymap for hindi language that is very user friendly.
• Ragini
I built a tool called Ragini that can stream MP3s, movies and other media. The module was built over Apache.
• Voronoi Diagrams and Delaunay triangulation
We implemented a tool which computes the Voronoi Diagrams and the Delaunay Triangulation in time O(nlogn) for randomly selected points in two dimensions.
• Automated Theorem Prover
We looked into the various strategies and algorithms of First Order Automated Theorem Proving (like Gandalf Theorem Prover). We also built a prototype to prove simpler theorems.Automatic Online Form Filling Using Semantic Inference

• Summer Internship at SoftJin Infotech, Bangalore, India (May – July 2004)
Implemented a tool (GDS2html), which is a very convenient tool for analyzing the physical layouts. This project falls in the domain of physical design automation of EDA (VLSI-CAD).

• Simulation of a Quantum Computer
In this project a quantum computer was simulated which can do basic computations in the quantum way. It also provides the user to test the common quantum gates and compute the Quantum Fourier Transform.

• 4-bit CPU
We implemented a 4-bit CPU based on 74181 chips, which performs a few basic functions. The Control Unit was based on a hardwired design.

SEMINARS AND TALKS

• Junior Undergraduate Thesis
As my Junior Thesis, I studied various kinds of security threats, different kinds of malicious code, how the virus attacks, where they reside, their attack cycle and how to prevent those viruses. I also looked into various aspects of Network Security, DoS and DDoS attacks, Packet Sniffing, DNS, Email, IP Spoofing etc.
• Localization of Linux
I presented a 1-hr lecture on Linux and its Localization at Vidhya Pratishthan's Institute of Information Technology Baramati.Automatic Online Form Filling Using Semantic Inference

• Godel’s Incompleteness Theorem
We presented a talk on implications of Godel’s Incompleteness Theorem on the limitations of modern computers and its relation to AI.

• Neural Networks Approach to solve Traveling Salesman Problem
In this seminar, we discussed TSP using different Neural Networks. We also designed a simulation tool for solving TSP.

TECHNICAL SKILLS

Operating Systems	Linux, Solaris, BSD, Debian, Macintosh, AIX, Windows
Programming languages	C, C++,  JAVA, Fortran, Pascal, 8085/8086 Assembly
Scripting	Unix Shell, Perl/CGI, PHP, Scheme, Prolog, Haskell, Javascript
Databases	SQL, MySQL, Oracle
Others	XUL, HTML, XML, AJAX, SQL, VHDL, Verilog, Prolog, Matlab, Perforce, CVS
System Administration	Configuration and maintenance of web/ftp servers, nfs/nis/ldap servers, squid proxy server, dns server, firewall setup, media streaming server etc.

EXTRA CURRICULAR ACTIVITIES

• I was one of the 4 members of Middle Layer Committee (MLC) of IIT Bombay (2004-05). It is a student body to look after Networking and Computer related problems in the institute. At the same time, it has to provide technical assistance to the System Administrators and students.
• I was the System Administrator of Hostel Eight (2004-05) which has around 150 computers. As a System Administrator I have to ensure the proper functioning of LAN of the hostel and provide technical assistance to the inmates.
• I was the Script Coordinator of PAF (performing arts festival), 2005 for the hostel. PAF is a one hour long live play involving original script, music, production etc. Usually, it requires one month hard work of about 100 students to make one PAF.
• I was the Dramatics Secretary of Hostel Eight (2002-03) and participated in various dramatics events like Street Play, Drams, Impromptu etc. We won the cultural trophy in my tenure.
• I am currently the web-admin of Database Systems Lab in UBC.