Kriti Puniyani
Graduate student, Carnegie Mellon University
5000 Forbes Ave,
CMU LTI GHC 5407
Pittsburgh PA 15213.
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~kpuniyan/
kpuniyan@cs.cmu.edu

Research Interests
  • Machine learning, computational biology, text mining.
Educational Record and Academic Achievements
  • Ph.D. Candidate, Language Technologies Institute, School of Computer Science, CMU. (started Fall 2007). GPA : 3.96
  • M.Tech. in Computer Science, IIT Bombay (2006). CPI : 9.71
  • Awarded the Nilesh Vashee fellowship for best performance in the M.Tech. batch in Fall 2004.
  • B.E. in Information Technology, University of Mumbai (2004) with distinction. 77.1%
  • 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.
Publications
  1. Social Link Prediction from Text and Network Features
    Kriti Puniyani, Sonal Gupta, Jacob Eisenstein, Eric Xing (In Preparation, draft version available) 2012
  2. Gin-IM : From ISH images to gene interaction networks
    Kriti Puniyani, Eric Xing. (Under review) 2012.
  3. 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) 2010.
  4. Multi-Population GWA Mapping via Multi-Task Regularized Regression
    Kriti Puniyani, Seyoung Kim, Eric P. Xing. Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology 2010.
  5. 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)
  6. Optimizing Scoring Functions & Indexes for Proximity Search in Type Annotated Corpora.
    Soumen Chakrabarti, Kriti Puniyani, and Sujatha Das. WWW 2006
  7. 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)
Work Experience
  1. 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.
  2. 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 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. Presented 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. Awarded 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.