About Me

I'm a third year PhD student in the Computer Science Department. I have the great fortune to be advised by both Luis von Ahn and Manuel Blum, and to be supported by an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship. After receiving my BS in computer science at Carnegie Mellon in 2007, a passion for the northwest led me to Microsoft Research from June 2007 to August 2008. I worked the smarts behind Microsoft Recite and enjoyed getting a taste of industry research.
I greatly enjoy spending time outdoors, playing trombone, cooking, listening to classical and jazz music, struggling to remember German, and playing board games. Occasionally (perhaps more often than I should), I pretend to be a rock star with three other friends.

Research Interests

My interests lie in the intersection of theory and practice. In particular, I focus on applying techniques from data-mining, algorithms, and graph models to real-world networks. To that end I've been collecting data from Twitter over the last year using their freely available API. Dealing with data on the scale of approximately 1 terabyte has led me down the path of thinking about expressing various algorithms in the language of MapReduce.

Publications and Patents

Workshop Papers:


Patent Applications:

  • Self-compacting Pattern Indexer: Storing, Indexing, and Accessing Information in a Graph-like Data Structure. Kunal Mukerjee, Donald Thompson, Jeff Cole, and Brendan Meeder. USPTO Patent Application 20090112905
  • Speech Interfaces. Kunal Mukerjee and Brendan Meeder. USPTO Patent Application 20100057452.

Miscellaneous

I enjoy reading about the history of mathematics and working on recreational mathematics. Project Euler is a source of nice mathematical problems that require some math and clever algorithmic techniques to solve.

The webpage of my favorite living mathematician is here.

I find visualizations of data to be quite appealing, and suggest that you check out Visual Complexity for some really beautiful pictures of all sorts of data.
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