Prior to this, I spent two and a half years in the Advertising Sciences group at Yahoo! Labs, where I worked on several challenging problems related to Display Advertising.

Prior to this, I spent three years at Microsoft Corporation in Redmond, WA, and also had a brief stint at Amazon.com's customer behavior team where I developed and deployed a scalable Bayesian Classifier to recommend Amazon products on Amazon Associate websites.

I spent two years in the beautiful campus of UBC in Vancouver, British Columbia, as a postdoctoral fellow in the Database Systems Lab (Now called the Data Management and Mining Laboratory) in the Computer Science Department, where I worked on problems in XML and Data Privacy.

I earned my Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University at Albany, (SUNY Albany). My thesis focussed on theoretical and empirical problems in Itemset Mining.

During the course of my Ph.D., I had the opportunity to work in the industry thrice. In 2001, I spent five months at Avaya Labs, working on interesting text mining problems related to broadcast news indexing and summarization. In 1999, I spent three months at HP Labs and in 1998, at General Electric Corporate Research and Development.

On the non-academic side, I grew up in Chennai (formerly Madras) in South India. I like to hike, bike, run, listen to anything melodious (mostly celtic, hindustani and carnatic classical, Mohammad Rafi, Ilayaraja, Jazz and Classic Rock but not restricted to these and not necessarily in this order), read (when my kids permit me to) and on top of it all, I like to spend time with my better half and two kids who teach me a lot about patience, happiness, sharing, identifying the important things in life, cherishing and enjoying little moments in life and help me evolve in the process.

Under Construction

Here is the diet that brought the biggest drop in cholesterol levels. (The researchers did not test to see whether supplements worked, so stick with whole foods.)

-- Soy products. Eat four servings a day; each serving is equivalent to 4 ounces of firm tofu, 1 cup of soy milk, 1/2 cup of soybeans, 3/4 cup of soy yogurt, or 1/3 cup roasted soy nuts.

-- Nuts. Eat about 1.5 ounces per day of any kind of nuts, including almonds, peanuts, and cashews.

-- Foods fortified with plant sterols. Eat four servings a day of products fortified with plant sterols, including an 8-ounce glass of orange juice, cup of yogurt, and tablespoon of margarine. The US Food and Drug Administration allows such fortified foods to be labeled cholesterol-lowering.

-- Fiber-rich foods. Eat four to five 4-ounce servings a day of foods rich in viscous fiber, a kind of sticky fiber found in beans, legumes, oats, barley, and cereals that contain psyllium. Wheat bran and produce rich in insoluble fiber -- for all their nutritional benefits -- do not contain much viscous fiber