nsharifr@cs.cmu.edu Office: 6607 Gates Hillman Center, Carnegie Mellon University.

Narges Sharif-Razavian

 

Hi, and welcome to my webpage. I’m a second year PhD student in Language Technologies Institute, and I’m working with my advisor, Prof. Christopher James Langmead, on Graphical Models applied to protein structure modeling. We’re currently working on Estimation and Inference for continuous multivariate models of backbone torsion angles, including multivariate Gaussian model and von-Mises model. The next step is the analysis of these graphical models, in particular aiming at improving drug design application.

 

Prior to my PhD, I was a Master student here in LTI, working on Statistical Machine Translation with Prof. Stephan Vogel.

 

You can find my resume here: PDF

My Research Interests

Graphical Models: Parameter Estimation and Inference on Continuous Multivariate Models, Network Analysis, Protein/Protein Interaction, Drug Design, Protein Structure Prediction, Structural Biology, Computational Biology.

 

Relevant Courses:

10-725 Optimization

15-879 Algorithms for Computational Structural Biology

10-810 Computational Genomics

11-762 Languages and Statistics II

Auditing: Physiology, Modern Biology, Bio-Chemistry

 

Teaching Assistantship

This Spring I’m TA-ing the Machine Learning course 10-601, taught by Prof. Roni Rosenfeld.

 

Publication and Technical Reports

• Narges Razavian, Hetu Kamisetty, Christopher Langmead, “Expectation Propagation for von-Mises Graphical Models”, Under preparation for ICML2011.
• Narges Razavian, Hetu Kamisetty, Christopher Langmead, “The von Mises Graphical Model: Structure Learning”, Submitted to AISTATS 2011. 
• Narges Razavian, Hetu Kamisetty, Arvind Ramanathan, Subhodeep Moitra, Christopher Langmead, “DyNA: Dynamic Network Analysis for Molecular Dynamics Data”, Under  preparation for Journal of Nucleic Acid Research.
• Narges Razavian, Subhodeep Moitra, Hetu Kamisetty, Arvind Ramanathan, Christopher J. Langmead, “Time-Varying Gaussian Graphical Models of Molecular Dynamics Data” Proceedings of 3DSIG 2010 Structural Bioinformatics and Computational Biophysics, Boston, MA. July 9-10, 2010.
• Narges Razavian, Selen Uguroglu, Andreas Zollmann. “Species Selection for Phylogeny-Based Motif Detection”, Computational Genomics Technical Report, June 2009
• Narges Razavian, Andreas Zollmann. “An Overview of Nonparametric Bayesian Models and Applications to Natural Language Processing”, Languages and Statistics II project report, January 2009
• Narges Razavian, Stephan Vogel,“Fixed Length Word Suffix as New Factors in Factored Statistical Machine Translation”, ACL 2010, also presented in LTI Student Research Symposium, September 2010
• Narges Razavian, Stephan Vogel,“The Web as a Platform to Build Machine Translation Resources”, International Workshop on Intercultural Collaboration(IWIC2008), Stanford, USA February 2009
• Narges Razavian, Fattaneh Taghiyareh,“Embedding Corporate Blogging System in CRM Solutions” Information Technology: New Generations (ITNG), Las Vegas, USA, April 2008.
• Mostafa Keikha, Narges Razavian, Farhad Oroumchian, Hassan Seyedrazi,“Document Representation and Quality of Text: An Analysis”, Survey of Text Mining: Clustering, Classification, and Retrieval, Second Edition, Chapter 12, pp219-232,Springer London, ISBN 978-1-84800-046-9, July 2007.

Fun little projects:

In my Social Networks class project we developed a Facebook Application called Tetris For Research. It has about ~1300 monthly active users! Make sure to check it out Here

 

Personal

In my free time I like to draw (I’ve taken CMU’s figure drawing class and attend the weekly Sunday drawing session in Fine arts building), read books, and watch documentaries. I travel a lot, and like to try new things. Currently my favorite person is Oprah Wimfrey. I’m learning from her and many other great folks how to make this world a better place.

Useful Links

I'm just beginning to gather a list of links I think might be useful one way or the other. The list is short now but hopefully I'll add more and more stuff to it as time goes on. If you found a particular link helpful drop me a line! 

• A nice collection of Machine Learning lectures: http://videolectures.net/Top/Computer_Science/Machine_Learning/
• A very nice course on Graphical Models, taught by Prof. Eric Xing. http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~epxing/Class/10708/
• A Farsi tagged corpus of size 2.6 million words, of daily news and common texts. The corpus is manually POS tagged and documents are categorized into 4300 different subjects: http://ece.ut.ac.ir/dbrg/bijankhan/
• A number of translated poems of Rumi, the great Persian poet of 13th Century. http://www.rumionfire.com/shams/index.htm
• Some cool data sets for your research: Stanford Large Network Dataset Collection, Youtube and Flickr and Digg data set , A large website full of data(Specially Twitter dataset), and lots of valuable Language(LDC) dataset
• A tutorial on Belief Propagation on Factor graphs PDF slides
• How to get your own Twitter data

Favorite Quotations

"Let the beauty of what you love be what you do". -- Rumi
"The way you think will create the reality for you" --Oprah Winfrey
"When faced with a very hard choice, toss a coin. It works not because it settles the question for you, but because, in that brief moment with the coin is in the air, you suddenly know what you are hoping for."