I am originally from New Delhi, India, where I did my schooling from Sardar Patel Vidyalaya. I started gaining interest in Computer Science right after high school. By the time it was time to pursue undergrad, I was pretty sure of what I wanted to major in. I completed my under-grad from Netaji Subhas Institute of Technology (Delhi University). Undergrad was mostly about learning new programming languages and getting a feel of different platforms and the industry. I got interested in data-mining and started out of curriculum research in tree based classifiers at Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, which turned into my undergrad thesis. After undergrad I worked for a year at Conexant Systems as a Software Engineer. It was a great experience in terms of working in teams and on large projects. It gave me an hands on experience of software life cycles and how much management goes into delivering the smallest component of a bigger product. Having gained the required and essential skills, I felt I was ready to take a step forward and therefore decided to pursue a Masters. In fact, I wanted to do a PhD and even applied for it, but without a single publication to my name, I was being kind of ambitious. In my Masters at Columbia University, NY, I got really interested in Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning. I took the relevant courses and it was nice to turn one of my course projects into a paper that recently got accepted at EACL-2009. Currently, I am a PhD student at Columbia University working on extracting social networks out of fiction/non-fiction texts. It’s so super interesting!