Computer Science

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

My Research Interests
Over the past years, my interests in computer science included software development and code generation, content management systems, Internet-based information retrieval and data mining. Today I am primarily interested in the application of computer science to research in media studies and communication. I am focused on experimenting with methods from a combination of areas, more or less centered on computational linguistics and information retrieval.

Content Management
Before turning to 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
My other interests have been 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 Ph.D. program in computer science at Arizona State University.

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 have a tremendous impact when applied to other fields, whether academic or professional.

Fortunately, I was not the only one to believe in these ideas: the following year I was admitted to the Ph.D. program in Journalism and Public Communication at the University of Maryland, where I am currently doing research in computational media studies.

Projects
Most of my projects related to computer science 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.

• Giggle 3.0: A "mini-google" for the uni.edu domain (Fall 2007)

• Witness Identification project in psychology (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 for web-based applications (2006 - 2007)

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

• Application of machine learning techniques to web page content classification: A Problem analysis (Spring 2006)

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

• Giggle: online information retrieval system (Spring 2005)

• Compiler for Player, a scaled-down general purpose programming language (2004)

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

• Visual demo of sorting algorithms in Java (2003)

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

Why Computer Science?
Why did I turn to computer science after years in business, public relations and what not? Because I have found it to resemble the study of magic; which, in my opinion, is way cool. Today, computer science is many things to me; but at the very beginning, when I was learning how to program, it was about discovering new ways to model the world, and then watch those models come to life ...if they compiled, of course.