Kriti Puniyani I am a Ph.D. student at the Language Technologies Institute, School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University, since Fall 2007. I work in machine learning, with applications to social media analysis and computational biology, with Prof. Eric Xing. I completed my Masters in 2006 from IIT Bombay, where I worked on information retrieval with Prof. Soumen Chakrabarti. In my spare time, I like cooking (especially Indian food), dancing, Zumba fitness, and exploring new street food. I also love reading, both dead tree stuff and online media. Resume Office: 6405, Gates Hillman Center. Email: kpuniyan AT cs DOT cmu DOT edu

Recent Activities

• July 2013 : Our paper 'GINI : From ISH images to Gene Interaction Networks' has been accepted for publication in PLOS Computational Biology(submitted Dec 2012, accepted July 2013).
• Jun 2013 : The extended version of our RECOMB 2013 paper has been accepted to the Journal of Computational Biology (JCB).
• Jan 2013 : I am TA-ing 10-708 Probabilistic Graphical Models again this semester.
• Jan 2013 : RECOMB paper accepted : NP-MuScL: Unsupervised Global Prediction of Interaction Networks from Multiple Data Sources
• Jan 2013 : Thesis proposal completed. The project page is up here.
• July 2012 : ECCV 2012 paper accepted: Inferring gene interaction networks from ISH images via kernelized graphical models.
• June 2012 : Interning at Google+ this summer.
• May 2012 : Poster at ISMB 2012. Gin-IM: From ISH images to gene interaction networks.
• Mar 2012 : ICML 2012 paper accepted. Sparse Additive Functional and Kernel CCA with Sivaraman Balakrishnan and John Lafferty.
• Jan 2012 : One of 75 students invited to attend the 2012 Google GRAD CS Forum.
• May 2011 : Recipient of the Google Anita Borg Memorial Scholarship 2011. See the announcement here,

Research

• Learning gene networks from 2-D images: We are trying to learn gene regulatory networks from 2-dimensional images of Drosophila embryos. Using a variety of techniques from computer vision, and machine learning, we are developing models to be able to determine expression patterns of genes and find the relationships between them. More about this project at http://www.sailing.cs.cmu.edu/Drosophila_ISH_images.
• Transcriptional control in Drosophila: We are trying to develop models that predict transcriptional gene expression, given the CRM sequence and the amount of transcription factors present in the cell. We have modeled the process of transcription control using thermodynamic principles, and have expressed it as a graphical model. Using approximate inference, we are able to fit and predict gene expression.
• Structured association mapping: We are trying to solve the classical problem of population structure in association mapping, using multi-variate regression. Via this project, I am trying to use various optimization techniques to optimize convex problems efficiently.
• Social media analysis: We are working on new models that allow predictions on how "friends" interact with one another on social networks, by jointly analyzing text and network features.