Associate professor Computer Science and Engineering Kanwal Rekhi Building IIT Bombay Powai, Mumbai-400076. sunita [at] iitb.ac.in

Publications Professional Activities Education and Experience Teaching Students Talks Biography,CV

Office Hours:

Usual schedule: Tuesdays and Fridays: 5:00 -- 6:00pm. Thursdays: 3--5 pm. At other times by appointment.

Education and Affiliations

• Associate professor, IIT Bombay
• Visiting associate professor at the Computer science department of CMU (Jan 2004 -June 2004).
• Research Staff Member in the QUEST database mining group at IBM Almaden Research Center  from Aug 96 to Feb 99.
• PhD: Computer Science Division at the University of California, Berkeley. Thesis title: Query processing in tertiary memory databases, Thesis advisor: Michael Stonebraker.
• BTech: Computer Science and Engineering, Indian institute of technology, Kharagpur.

Research Interest

• World Wide Tables: The goal of this project is to answer table queries by tapping partially structured sources like tables and lists on the web.
• Information Extraction and data integration: Recently, I have been interested in graphical models and their use for various extraction and integration problems. As part of this effort, I have developed a package for Conditional Random Fields (CRF) that can be downloaded from sourceforge.
• ALIAS: This is a prototype of an interesting and fairly compelling application of the use of machine learning techniques like Active Learning to ease the duplicate elimination task that arise in data cleaning.
• DATAMOLD: is a tool for Information Extraction (more like text segmentation) using learning based on Hidden Markov Models. This software has been licensed by a data cleaning consulting company to solve real-life address cleaning tasks.
• ICube: This is a project on which I worked actively between 1999-2001. It is about enhanced mining of multidimensional OLAP products. A web demo of ICube is available.
• New data mining operations: I have worked on temporal data mining. Currently interested in various multi-class, multi-label and multi-taxonomy learning problems.
• Database mining integration: I have worked on two different aspects of this problem. First on algorithmic and architectural issues related to expressing association rule mining algorithm, in a relational engine. Second, on deploying learnt models within a relational engine so as to allow close integration with SQL querying and optimization.
• Some past projects (pre-1996): In the past I have worked on various problems related to multidimensional OLAP indexing and aggregation computation. My PhD thesis was on query optimization and scheduling for tertiary memory databases.
• Ancient projects (pre-1991): I got my first glimpse to research in computer science theory through search problems arising in rectangle cutting and packing problems.

Selected professional activities

• VLDB 2011 Research track Co-chair
• VLDB member of the endowment board (2008--)
• ACM SIGKDD 2008 PC Co-chair
• ACM SIGKDD, member of the Board of directors (2005-present)
• SIGKDD Explorations, Editor-in-chief (2003-2005), Associate Editor (1999 - 2002)
• ACM TODS, Editorial board(2004-2007)
• ACM Transactions on KDD, Editorial board(2005-present)
• Foundations and Trends® in Machine Learning Editorial board (2007-present)
• IEEE Data Engineering Bulletin, Associate Editor (2000 to 2001)
• Program committe member
  • ACM SIGKDD 2006 Workshop chair
  • ACM SIGMOD 1998, 2002 (Demo committee), 2003, 2005, 2006
  • VLDB 2000, 2002, 2004, 2007
  • ACM SIGKDD 2001 (also in Best paper award committee), 2003, 2004, 2005, 2009 (Best paper committee), 2010 (Best paper committee)
  • ICML: 2003, 2011, 2013
  • IEEE ICDE 98, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2005, 2006 (demo)
  • IEEE ICDM, Vice chair 2005
  • EDBT 2006,2011
  • COMAD 2000, 2005, 2008,2010
  • WWW 2006, 2013
  • CIDR 2009, 2010
  • WSDM 2013
• Senior PC, Vice chair etc
• ICML 2008
• KDD 2011, KDD 2012, KDD 2013
• NIPS 2011, 2012
• Knowledge discovery and data mining track,   ICDE 2000
• ICDE 2008
• Sigmod 2009
• Others
  • ICDE 2010 Tutorial chair
  • WWW 2011 Tutorial chair

Teaching

• Introduction to Machine Learning, Autumn 2011
• Advanced Machine learning, Spring 2010, Spring 2011, Spring 2012
• Foundations of Machine learning, Autumn 2009, Autumn 2012
• CS 627: Graphical models and structured learning Spring 2008
• CS 636: Data mining Fall 2007
• IT655:Advanced data mining: Probabilistic graphical models , Spring 2006, Spring 2007
• IT608: Data warehousing and data mining, Spring 2000-03, 2005, Fall 2005, Fall 2006
• IT655:Advanced data mining: Beyond record data mining: Prediction with richer structures (sequences, trees, and graphs) , Fall 2004
• IT603: Data Base Management Systems, Fall 1999, 2001
• IT619: Graduate Software Lab, Autumn 2000

Publications

Patents

• 1 6,324,533 Integrated database and data-mining system
• 2 6,189,005 System and method for mining surprising temporal patterns
• 3 6,094,651 Discovery-driven exploration of OLAP data cubes
• 4 5,832,475 Database system and method employing data cube operator for group-by operations

Talks

• Statistical Machine Learning for Complex Predictions in Large-scale Scenarios, Invited speaker at the International Colloquium on Perspectives in Fundamental Research, Homi Bhabha Birth Centenary Event. March 2010.
• Structured learning. Tutorial at Machine Learning Winter School, Bangalore Jan 2010. Slides: part 1 and part 3 part 2
• Queries over unstructured data: probabilistic methods to the rescue. Keynote talk at BIRTE 2009 slides
• Structured prediction models in information extraction. Invited talk at the Data mining Forum Hongkong May 2008
• The Role of Probabilistic Graphical Models in Databases. Tutorial at VLDB 2007. (with Amol Deshpande) Slides
• Scalable information extraction and data integration. Tutorial at KDD 2006. (with Eugene Agichtein) Slides
• Record linkage: Similarity measures and algorithms Tutorial at SIGMOD 2006 (with Nick Koudas and Divesh Srivastava). Slides
• Graphical models for structure extraction and information integration. Keynote talk at ICDM 2005, Nov 2005. Slides
• Models and indices for integrating unstructured data with a relational database. Keynote talk at KDID workshop, ECML/PKDD, September 2004.
• Sequence data mining. Tutorial at KDD 2003 (with Mark Craven). Slides
• Automation in Information extraction and data integration. Tutorial at VLDB 2002. Slides

Current Students

• Arun Iyer PhD.
• Gaurish Chaudhuri, MTech 2013
• Vashist Avadhanula, MTech 2013
• Abhirut Gupta, MTech 2014
• Vivek Sembium, MTech 2014