Kriti Puniyani
Graduate student, Carnegie Mellon University
Office: 5000 Forbes Ave, Home: 2083 El Camino Real
CMU LTI GHC 5407Palo Alto, California 94306
Pittsburgh PA 15213. Phone: 412-973-6593
Email: kpuniyan@cs.cmu.edu
 http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~kpuniyan

Research Interests
  • Machine learning, computational biology, text mining, social media analysis.
Educational Record and Academic Achievements
  • Ph.D. Candidate, Language Technologies Institute, School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University since Fall 2007 (expected summer 2013). GPA : 3.98
  • M.Tech. in Computer Science, IIT Bombay (2006). CPI : 9.71.
  • B.E. in Information Technology, Ramrao Adik Institute of Technology, University of Mumbai (2004) with distinction. CPI : 77.1% (highest CPI in class).
Honors and awards
  • Google Anita Borg Scholar, 2011.
  • Best research talk awards in the LTI student research symposium in 2009 and 2010.
  • Google Anita Borg Finalist, 2009.
  • The Nilesh Vashee fellowship for best performance in MTech, Fall 2004.
  • Awarded the J. R. D. Tata scholarship for outstanding academic performance during B.E. (2002-2004)
  • Ranked first in Ramrao Adik Institute of Technology in all 8 Semesters.
  • Ranked third overall in the Information Technology Department of Mumbai University from among more than 1800 students.
  • Travel awards: Microsoft(WWW 2006), Google(ICML 2012), Department of Energy(ISMB 2010), ISCB and NSF (ISMB 2010)
  • One of 75 grad students invited to attend the Google grad CS forum 2012.
Publications
  1. Gin-IM : From ISH images to gene interaction networks
    Kriti Puniyani, Eric Xing. (Under review, draft available) 2012.
  2. NP-MuScL: Unsupervised Global Prediction of Interaction Networks from Multiple Data Sources
    Kriti Puniyani, Eric Xing, RECOMB (Research in Computational Molecular Biology), LNCS Vol. 7821, pp 173-185, 2013.
  3. Inferring gene interaction networks from ISH images via kernelized graphical models
    Kriti Puniyani, Eric Xing. ECCV (The European Conference on Computer Vision), LNCS Vol. 7577, pp 72-85, 2012.
  4. Sparse additive functional and kernel CCA
    Sivaraman Balakrishnan, Kriti Puniyani, John Lafferty. ICML 2012.
  5. SPEX^2: Automated Concise Extraction of Spatial Gene Expression Patterns from Fly Embryo ISH Images. Kriti Puniyani, Christos Faloutsos, Eric P. Xing. Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology(ISMB), Bioinformatics Vol. 26, Issue 12, pp i47-i56, 2010.
  6. Multi-Population GWA Mapping via Multi-Task Regularized Regression
    Kriti Puniyani, Seyoung Kim, Eric P. Xing. ISMB, Bioinformatics Vol. 26, Issue 12, pp i208-i216, 2010.
  7. Social Links from Latent Topics in Microblogs.
    Kriti Puniyani, Jacob Eisenstein, Shay Cohen and Eric P. Xing. Social Media Workshop, NAACL 2010 (best talk award to Jacob Eisenstein)
  8. Optimizing Scoring Functions & Indexes for Proximity Search in Type Annotated Corpora.
    Soumen Chakrabarti, Kriti Puniyani, and Sujatha Das. World Wide Web conference (WWW), ACM, pp 717-726, 2006
  9. Enhanced Business Intelligence Using EROCS.
    With Manish Bhide, Venkatesan Chakaravarthy, Ajay Gupta, Himanshu Gupta, Mukesh Mohania, Prasan Roy, Sourashis Roy, and Vibhuti Sengar. ICDE 2008 (International Conference on Data Engineering, Mexico)
Book Chapter
  • Text search enhanced with types and entities.
    Soumen Chakrabarti, Sujatha Das, Vijay Krishnan, Kriti Puniyani.
    Chapter in Text Mining: Theory, Application, and Visualization, Srivastava and Sahami, eds., 2008.
Work Experience
  1. Google+ research and analytics intern : June 2012 - present
    Working on machine learning models for Google plus social data.
  2. Yahoo! (Technology & Research Group), Bangalore : February 2007 - July 2007
    Worked on approximating wrapper induction techniques for enhanced web retrieval, and extracting citations from a webpage using CRFs.
  3. IBM India Research Labs (IRL) : August 2006 - February 2007
    Worked on enhancing business intelligence by supporting visual analysis of unstructured data on top of IBM's AlphaBlox, using EROCS (Entity RecOgnition in Context of Structured data - VLDB 2006)
Selected Talks
  1. Awarded the best research talk award for a talk on "Automated Gene Expression Analysis from Drosophila Embryo ISH Images" in the Student Research Symposium at LTI, October 2010.
  2. Invited to present a talk on "Preparing Your PhD Proposal" to around 100 PhD students, with Prof. Ming Lin, at the CRA-W grad cohort for women, April 2010, Seattle.
  3. Awarded the best talk award for a talk on "Incorporating Population Structure in Association Mapping" in the Student Research Symposium at LTI, October 2009.
  4. Presented a talk on "Type-enabled Proximity Search Using Entities and Relations" in a one week Short Term Training Program on "Advanced Database Concepts & Applications" for Engineering College Teachers on June 6, 2006 in Don Bosco Institute of Technology, Mumbai.
  5. Presented a talk on "Preserving Privacy in Data Mining" in SecNet 2006 to more than 100 industry and academic attendees on 5th March 2006, at IIT Bombay.
  6. Won 2nd Prize (out of 250 participants) for presentation of a paper on "Smart Cards: Security & Solutions" at Abhiyantriki, K.J.Somaiya CoE, Mumbai in Jan 2003.
Teaching Assistantships
  1. Probabilistic Graphical Models (Fall 2009) : Prof. Eric Xing
  2. Statistical Machine Learning (Spring 2008) : Prof. Larry Wasserman and Prof. John Lafferty
  3. Web Search and Mining (Spring 2006) : Prof. Soumen Chakrabarti,
  4. Statistical Foundations of Machine Learning (Fall 2005) : Prof. Soumen Chakrabarti,
  5. Software Systems Lab (Spring 2005) : Prof. G Sivakumar,
  6. Advanced Programming (Fall 2004) : Prof. S Arunkumar.
  • Responsible for conducting lectures, tutorials, supervising assignments and setting & grading examinations.
Courses
  • PhD: Intermediate statistics, machine learning, optimization, statistical machine learning, graphical models, molecular biology, social media analysis, algorithms for natural language processing, social media analysis, cell systems and modeling.
  • MTech: Approximation Algorithms, Hypertext Retrieval & Mining, Data Mining, Advanced Data Mining, Artificial Intelligence, Databases, Algorithms & Complexity, Language Processors, Network Security.
Service
  • Reviewer for : IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, PLoS Computational Biology, RECOMB SB-RG-DREAM 2008, ISMB/ECCB 2009, RECOMB 2010.
  • Vice-president of the Indian Graduate Student Association of Carnegie Mellon University (2009-2010)
  • Member of the LTI student activities committee (2008-2011)
  • Member of Dec/5 - the social support organisation of CMU SCS graduate students (2008-2010)
  • Student Placement Representative, IIT Bombay, 2005-2006 : Involved in managing PPTs, tests and other recruitment processes of companies.
  • Technical Secretary of Hostel-11, IIT Bombay, 2005-06.
  • Member of the organizing team of SecNet 2005, a workshop on Computer Security.
  • Event Head of the Technical Paper Presentation of 360 Degrees.
  • Hospitality Head of Whizion-2002, the Techfest organized by IEEE-RAIT.