PROFESSIONAL/RESEARCH EXPERIENCE

CURRENT/ON-GOING

Spring '09 - present: Graduate Research Assistant, Center for Computational Learning Systems (CCLS), Columbia University, NY 

• built systems to extract different types of power relations from written dialog
• introduced a new multiclass SVM method, obtaining 10% error reduction on dialog act tagging
• developed a system to automatically detect overt displays of power in written dialog
• built a system to detect committed belief and other modalities expressed in text

PAST

Summer ‘14: Software Engineering Intern, Local Question Answering, Google, NY.

• implemented a system to extract representative menu Items from restaurant reviews

Summer '13: Research Intern, IBM Watson/DeepQA, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, NY.

• boosted negation detection performance (F-score) by 26.9% in WatsonMD
• refined relation extraction pipeline, improving WatsonMD Q&A accuracy by 2.4%

Summer '12: Research Scientist Intern, Collaborative Applications Research Dept., Avaya Labs, NJ.

• built a system to rank political candidates based on the interactions in presidential debates

Summer '11: Research Intern, Semantic Heart, Siemens Corporate Research, NJ.

• built a biomedical relation extraction system using distant supervision

Summer '09: Research Programmer. Columbia Center for Computational Learning Systems (CCLS), Columbia University, NY

• built a system to evaluate annotators for Arabic dialect modeling

Aug ’04 - Jul ‘08: Assistant Systems Engineer, TATA Consultancy Services Limited (TCSL), Chennai, India.

• developed and maintained software for Citibank credit cards