Well, it was two months back I received an email from PK asking me to help him organize an Indo-UK workshop on Cyber security jointly with RCUK, India. In spite of not having the background details for it, just the word “UK” excited me to work on this. It took me not more than 5 minutes to say a big “Yes”. The next response was a set of tasks required for the same and that too in not less than 5 minutes :D. The workshop was planned for 4 days, March 24-27, 2013 to discuss the Cyber security and online security issues, both in India and UK. It all started…

Though it is one of the most significant or rather say it, one of the most appealing problem in the domain of Network Science, but still it suffers from the most primitive flaw – subjectivity. Yes, I am talking about the problem of Community Detection or what some would like to call Clustering. Why did I use the word “subjectivity” ? Because a lot many definitions exist for how a cluster should be? Adding to the problem, there exist various evaluation metric pertaining to one or multiple features of this “definition”. The problem gets worse as usually there is limited or absolutely no ground truth for most of the social…

BrainstorM: Somebody during my graduate school life, told me [paraphrased] “Strength and / or creativity of a researcher is limited to the literature that he or she is aware of.” After going through a pleasant and a well-needed grind at Carnegie Mellon University, I have started preaching this to others. To practice what I preach, I started doing Research Paper reading sessions with my students starting Fall 2010. We did this for a semester, it went well; some students enjoyed it and some did not (understandably!). In Spring 2011, with the help of some of my Ph.D. students, we named the paper reading sessions as “BrainstorM” referred as BM among…

Ever since I got into reading papers, it has always fascinated how much knowledge can just a 8 page document hold. How can the 8 page document be currently extending the boundaries of human knowledge? By my blog posts, I want to draw attention of readers towards some of the upcoming concepts in the field of network science. Today I would like to illuminate readers about the topic of competitive influence maximization. The problem of influence maximization is quite a well known and has been studied extensively in the past few decades both by economists and computer scientists. However, to just be complete, lets define the problem of influence maximization…

INDIA2USA: Now it’s been a few weeks since I have come back from UMBC, Maryland, USA after spending the Spring, 2012 semester; and the hangover of the wonderful experience is still there ;-).  The dream started in Dec, 2011, when I first got to know about my plausible visit to UMBC. It was a mixed feeling of shock, excitement, uncertainty and apprehension and 4.5 months seemed a long time… The wait got longer because of some initial glitches like getting the wrong DS2019 documents and the drought of visa appointment dates at the US Embassy, but finally on 20th Jan, I got my golden pass to USA, I had exactly 8…

After working for more than 2 years in one of the India’s largest IT service Provider Company I always had a dream of working for a product based IT Company. The dream began to take a concrete shape on 3-May-2012 late in the evening when I found a mail in my inbox from my Training and Placement Officer asking for resume urgently for an internship opportunity in Microsoft. Initially I was a bit hesitant in sending my resume. I felt that I may not be able to make it through the selection process comprised of resume shortlisting, telephonic interview and then personal interview in the Microsoft campus in Gurgaon scheduled…

I am probably feeling the most satisfied at this point in time after taking up a faculty job! The reasons are many, most importantly my Ph.D. students. As of now, I have 5 Ph.D. students, by the time I am drafting this post, all of them are outside India. Four of the five have traveled international for the first time in their life. If you would have asked me say around Sept. 2011 whether this is something I would have expected, I would have simply said NO. I was keen on trying to give this sort of exposure to students, but, was not aggressively pursuing it. Some time in Sept.…

It’s always big when you expect it the least..!! The day I got selected for the Viterbi India Internship program, I was on cloud nine. It’s a different feeling to be amongst few students across the nation, selected for the prestigious program . I am working under Dr. Kristina Lerman at Information Science Institute, University of Southern California. My office is located in the beautiful city of Marina del Rey. My research problem is to compare and create different centrality matrices, to find influential people on social media.I am currently working on attention-limited page rank and attention limited alpha-centrality and their approximate versions. The idea is that non-conservative measures works…

15th March 2012, I was working in the lab, and suddenly got a mail that me and Vivekanand were nominated for a trip to Singapore for attending a workshop at NUS. It was beyond expectation, and I was delighted, ecstatic, overjoyed and excited all at the same time. It’s beyond description. But then, there was one more hurdle to cross, and we had to wait for the final selection from NUS. I need to apply for this summer school and final selection was by NUS. The application asked my research interest, why NUS should select you and future plans. I filled the application with full enthusiasm. And there it was,…