Computer Science

I am defending my master’s thesis in computer science in January 2008 at the University of Northern Iowa. My academic advisor is Dr. Eugene Wallingford. My thesis is on specification and code generation of the data layer for data-intensive web applications.

My Research Interests
Over the past several years, my interests in computer science included automatic code generation, content management, web-based search, information extraction and machine learning. Today I am primarily interested in the application of computer science to research in other fields.

Content Management
Before getting into computer science, I built web sites – lots of them. But then I started to learn about programming… Soon enough I was building content management systems, which automated much of the development process and gave the end user full control over the site’s content.

Content management, as well as the logical organization of web sites became my primary research interests. My experiments were based on the assumption that any web site is a structured collection of information: a set of interrelated and connected hierarchies, or a graph. I suppose, managing this graph should be the primary concern of a web site management system. I played around with different ideas, some of which I used in my real-world content management systems. Eventually, this turned into my master’s thesis on automatic code generation for data-intensive applications.

Web Search and Information Extraction
I also have been interested in web-based information retrieval and information extraction. These were triggered by a class with Dr. Kevin O’Kane, where I developed a web-based searching/browsing interface with dynamic clustering of search results. Later, I experimented with extracting information from web pages, automatically identifying their logical structure, and mapping their content to ontologies. Those were relatively simple experiments – I did not venture past basic machine learning techniques. However, I learned quite a bit and showed enough interest in the field to be admitted into the doctoral program in computer science at Arizona State University.

Not PhinisheD
My first semester went very well. I was especially fortunate to be in Dr. Subbarao Kambhampati’s class on Internet-based information retrieval, mining and integration. Those were some of the best lectures I’ve ever attended, with the assignments being among the most challenging, yet most rewarding (as it usually is in computer science).

And yet, after one semester I realized that a doctorate in computer science was simply not the perfect fit for me. It appears that what excites me about computer science, and, in fact, has pushed me in my studies all these years, is the application of computer science to other areas – such as communication, psychology, even building web sites, or anything else. I believe that computer science concepts – whether it is data representation and analysis, application of AI methods to discovering patterns or predicting behavior, modeling, or even just programming (the list can go on forever…) – all this can make a big difference when applied to other fields, whether academic or professional.

What’s Next?
As of today - December 3, 2007 - I have no idea whatsoever. Really. I am defending two master’s theses within a month or two. I will update this section after my defenses - once I have time to think it through.

Projects
Most of my computer science-related projects have been web-based apps and parts of larger systems. Below is a list of some of my favorite standalone projects. I will be adding the missing links as time permits.

• Automatic classification of Wikipedia articles: new version (Fall 2007)

• Giggle 2.0: A "mini-google" for the asu.edu domain (Spring 2007)

• Application of K-nearest neighbor algorithm to classification of Wikipedia articles (Spring 2007)

• Automatic code generation (2006 - 2007)

• Experiments with content management and web apps in .Net (2003 - 2007)

• Implementation of Prim's algorithm in Java (Spring 2006)

• Giggle: online information retrieval system (Spring 2005)

• Compiler for "Player" (2004)

• Experiments with content management in Java and XML (2003)

• Visual demo of sorting algorithms (2003)

• Visual demo of constructung and traversing binary trees (2002)