October 2008 Archives

I just noticed currently that my blog wasn't publishing whatever I wrote causing me a whole lot of headache. I finally did manage to figure out the issue being related to invalid permissions at the file system, i.e., the Blog system was unable to write to my DFS filesystem. I seem to have changed some filesystem permissions when trying out the a new php website on scripts.psu.edu. This blog has basically now doesn't let me mess around in my web filespace. However, the solution is simple: Use the SSH client and log into the DFS servers and try and modify the file permissions, which somehow doesn't work. The simplest solution that I found that works (but essentially the most complicated one) was to reset the ACL permissions for

• blog/ directory: If the error was encountered after the blog directory was written onto your DFS.
• www/ directory: Failsafe, resets all file system permissions to default.

Instructions on this can be found here.

In this post, I will highlight three academic conferences that I would like to publish/ present my work at.

1. ACM JCDL (Joint Conference on Digital Libraries): "The intended community for this conference includes those interested in such aspects of digital libraries as infrastructure; institutions; metadata; content; services; digital preservation; system design; implementation; interface design; human-computer interaction; evaluation of performance; evaluation of usability; collection development; intellectual property; privacy; electronic publishing; document genres; multimedia; social, institutional, and policy issues; user communities; and associated theoretical topics." - ACM JCDL website.  I am specifically interested in this conference since it keeps me updated on recent breakthroughs, research directions and current work that is being targeted by the digital library community.
   
2. IEEE TKDE (Transactions in Knowledge and Data Engineering): This IEEE journal targets research which potentially targets an audience whose interests are acquistion, management and storage of knowledge. More specifically the areas of impact include research in the fields of data mining, databases, knowledge engineering etc.This journal is a tier one archival journal which relates very specifically to my research interests in schema matching and value mapping problems.
   
3. WWW (World Wide Web Conference) conference: The WWW conference series is managed by the International World Wide Web Conferences Steering Committee (IW3C2). It aims to provide an excellent community to discuss the evolution of the Web, the standardization of its associated technologies, and the impact of those technologies on society and culture. This conference aligns with my interests in the Semantic Web and the next generation web. I have also found a number of interesting published articles here relating to wikipedia and its use for semantic translation, natural language processing and geographic entity similarity.
   

1. IEEE :
   
2. ACM :
   
3. Center for Policy Research, India:
   
4. Indira Gandhi Institute of Development Research :

I will take this oppurtunity to introduce a student from the Intelligent Information Systems Laboratory. Saurabh Kataria is a third year student in IST and works on image processing and topic modeling. While Saurabh is interested in designing and adapting topic modelling algorithms such as LDA, LSA, pLSI, n-topic grams etc, I am more interested in how these topic modeling algorithms can be applied in information systems to aid user information seeking needs. Saurabh is also part of the chemxseer project and works on extracting data from journal images such as plots. He has published his research in AAAI and JCDL as well as attended these conferences.

On a more personal side, Saurabh is my roomate and friend. His hometown is Jind, India which is pretty close to where I come from. He has a bachelor's degree from IT-BHU, Varanasi, India. He is a great guy and interested in sports such as cricket where he is classified as an all-rounder (a person who bowls and bats).

My advisor has had an interesting path up till this point in his career. He received his undergraduate degree (Bachelor's in Technology) in Computer Science from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, India. He then received his Master's in Sciences in Computer Science from the University of Texas, Austin. From 1995 he worked at the Oracle Corporation in California. He worked primarily in databases which possibly explains his interest in database theory and software. He then decided that the industry position doesn't really suit his goals and decided to pursue a PhD in Electrical Engineering at Stanford. His advisor was Prof. Gio Wiederhold and he received his PhD in 2004. Interestingly Dr. James Z. Wang at IST is also from the same research group.

Prasenjit's research interests include database systems, digital libraries, data mining, semantic web, information retreival and artificifial intelligence. His current active research projects are chemxseer (chemistry digital library), NEVAC and GeoCAM. He has recently gravitated towards data mining problems in the Geographic Information Systems domain on which I collaborate with him. I have also worked with him on the ChemXSeer project. His current research collaborators include Dr. Giles, Dr. Wang, Dr. Lee (all Penn State IST), Dr. MacEachren and Dr. Klippel (Penn State Geography) and Dr. Mueller and Dr. Garrison (Penn State Chemistry). Most of his recent publications involve digital libraries (EDBT, AAAI, CIKM) and image search (WWW).

He has taught the following courses over the past few years:

1. IST 220: Networking and Telecommunication
2. IST 461: Database Management and Administration
   
3. IST 512: Information Processing Architecture and Technology
   

When I arrived at Penn State five years back I believed myself to be one smart bloke though I quickly realized my shortcomings at being a genius. The first professor with whom I interacted here at happy valley was Dr. Prasenjit Mitra who has had a great hand in personally shaping my research and intellectual processes.

Prasenjit had arrived a semester earlier armed with a fresh PhD in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University and I became his first student in some respect. Over the past years I have got to know him quite well. Prasenjit is a native of the state of West Bengal, India. West Bengal is the only state in India which worships the sport of soccer so like all Bengalis he is an avid soccer fan and tries his best to play the game. He is a fan of Mohun Bagan F. C.He is one of the few Indian people I know who is a sports junkie. He also follows the sport of professional cricket and organizes a cricket club on weekends.

He is married and has one kid whom I have seen grow up. (I believe she was born 3 months before I first met him). Once every semester, he invites students from his research lab over for dinner. I think most of us look forward to those evenings as his wife is a super-duper cook. He is also very enthusiastic about Indian music which one can observe easily from his awesome music collection. Indian Oldies are one of his favorite  music genres and he loves music by the composer R. D. Burman.