I am a graduate student in LTI. My research interest is applying Machine Learning to Natural Language Processing problems, more specifically to the problem of discovering interesting structures in text. This is related to supervised/semi-supervised/unsupervised text classification and information extractions and some connections to information retireval and active learning. I also have some latent interest in sentiment analysis, (shallow) semantics, knowledge bases and ontologies. Currently, working on graphical model approach such as topic models.

I currently do not have an advisor. My advisors in Spring 09 semester were Eric Nyberg and Anatole Gershman while I was working on AKITA project.

My outdated CV will be updated soon and posted here (showing many years of industry experience).

I am a Siebel Scholar, IEEE and ACL member.

• Spring 2009: continued work on my Master's thesis and implementation of open source machine learning framework: STAT
• Fall 2008: started AKITA project and my related Master's thesis on some extension of LDA
• Summer 2008: [Details coming soon]
• Spring 2008: continuing the project mentioned below; targetting ACL Short Paper. Working on setting up a website to collect data.
• Fall 2007: working with William Cohen on Social Media course project.
• Fall 2007 - Spring 2009 : M.S. in Computer Science in Carnegie Mellon University
• Summer 2007: (briefly) worked with Scott Falhman on learning Scone. I created this XML web service which provides a SOAP based access to Scone engine running on my Linux server (thanks to server Lisp code by Ben Lambert)
• Spring 2007: worked with Noemie Elhadad on unsupervised summarization of restaurant reviews (dataset below)
• Fall 2006: worked with Julia Hirschberg and Andrew Rosenberg at Columbia University on GALE project (paper below)
• 2005-2006:
• worked with Esther Levin on evaluating the utility of LSA (paper below)
• worked with Mazin Rahim and Esther Levin at AT&T Research Lab (Florham Park, NJ)
• 2002-2004: M.S. in Computer Science from City University of New York, NY
• 1996-2001: B.S. in Industrial Engineering from K.N.Toosi University, Tehran, Iran

• Scheduling with Uncertain Resources: Learning to Ask the Right Questions
  Alexander Carpentier, Mehrbod Sharifi, Eugene Fink, Jaime G. Carbonell
  In Proceedings of IEEE SMC 2008



• Varying Input Segmentation for Story Boundary Detection in English, Arabic and Mandarin Broadcast News
  Andrew Rosenberg, Mehrbod Sharifi, Julia Hirschberg
  In Proceedings of INTERSPEECH 2007 - presented at Columbia



• Evaluation of Utility of LSA for Word Sense Discrimination
  Esther Levin, Mehrbod Sharifi, Jerry Ball
  In Proceedings of HLT/NAACL 2006 - presented at the conference



• A Lower Bound for Lebesgue's Universal Cover Problem
  Peter Brass, Mehrbod Sharifi
  In International Journal of Computational Geometry and Applications, Volume 15, Number 5, October 2005

• Restaurant Reviews: 50K+ user reviews. Coming Soon!

• STAT: Open Source Machine Learning Framework

• Spring 2009
  • 11-792 Software Engineering for Information Systems II
  • Completed Masters Thesis: Semi-supervised Extraction of Entity Attributes using Topic Models
  • Audit: 10-705 Intermediate Statistics
• Fall 2008
  • 11-791 Software Engineering for Information Systems
  • 11-711 Algorithms for NLP
  • 11-765 Active Learning Seminar
  • Started Masters Thesis - See the next semester above for more
  • Audit: 10-708 Probabilistic Graphical Models
  • Audit: 11-672 Language and Statistics II
• Spring 2008
  • 11-741 Information Retrieval
  • 11-761 Language and Statistics
  • 11-754 Speech Lab
  • Continuing project with William Cohen
  • Audit: 10-725 Optimization
  • Audit: 10-702 Statistical Machine Learning
• Fall 2007
• 10-701 Machine Learning
• 11-721 Grammar and Lexicon
• 11-772 Analysis of Social Media + Project with William Cohen
• Audit: 10-708 Probabilistic Graphical Models
• Audit: 10-705 Intermediate Statistics

• My CiteULike and LinkedIn account
• My new Wiki for academic stuff
• My Erdös number is 3 (Me -> Peter Braß -> Pavel Valtr -> Paul Erdös), whatever that really means ... though some interesting facts
• DNS and Domain Info Tools
• World Time
• Some quotes