About Me....

Kavita Ganesan, Ph. D. Candidate
Department of Computer Science
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Email: kganes2 (AT) illinois (DOT) edu

I am a PhD. candidate at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign (UIUC). I am proudly part of the Text Information Management (TIMAN) Group at UIUC. This group is led by Professor ChengXiang Zhai an excellent researcher and teacher in the field. Prior to this, I completed my Masters degree in  Computer Science at the University of Southern California. During this time, I worked under the guidance of Prof. Andrew Gordon and Craig Knoblock.
[ See Google Profile ]

Research Interests

My interests are a combination of Natural Language Processing, Information Retrieval and Data/Text Mining. Currently, I am pursuing research in text/opinion summarization and vertical search. I enjoy seeing research being put to good use. That said, I aim at making proposed techniques practical, efficient and scalable to bridge the gap between correctness and usability.

Education

Industry Experience

  • Software Engineer, eBay Inc., San Jose, California (Sep 2006- Aug 2008)
  • Research Intern, eBay Research Labs, San Jose, California (May 2006 - Sep 2006)
  • Research Intern, Stottler Henke Associates, Seattle, Washington (May 2005 - Aug 2005)
  • Software Engineer, Argisoft,  Malaysia (Apr 2003 - Aug 2004)

Research Experience

Honors & Awards

  • Yahoo! Grace Hopper Scholarship, 2011
  • Member of Phi Kappa Phi
  • Sohaib and Sara Abbasi Fellowship (2008/2009)
  • Innovation Award @ eBay Inc. (2007)

Professional Activities

  • Program Committee 2012: AAAI, NAACL, ACL
  • Program Committee 2011: AAAI, EMNLP
  • Invited Reviewer: ACM Transactions on Information Systems TOIS

Selected Publications