About me

I am a Lecturer in the Faculty of Information Technology at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. I do research in a number of different areas including:

• Information Retrieval and Web Mining
  Topic modeling, opinion detection and personalization with particular emphasis on applications to blog search, social bookmarking, and distributed information retrieval.
• Data Integration and Machine Learning
  Learning relational models for semi-structured data sources (like e-commerce websites). Query reformulation and schema matching algorithms for data integration and generating mash-ups.
• Automated Planning and Grid Computing
  Constraint satisfaction (CSP and SAT) encodings of Web-agent reasoning for Web Service orchestration. Marketplace algorithms for optimizing data access and availability on data grids.

Currently I work primarily on algorithms for discovering and personalizing access to blogs and other types of user-generated content. These algorithms combine ideas from machine learning, distributed information retrieval and data integration. In particular I make use of Bayesian modeling techniques such as language modeling and topic modeling.

Prior to moving back to Australia, I was a postdoc researcher in the Information Retrieval group within the Informatics Faculty at the University of Lugano, Switzerland. Before that I studied in the Information Integration Group at the Information Sciences Institute of USC and also at the Fondazione Bruno Kessler (formerly ITC-irst). My PhD thesis is from the University of Trento. For my thesis, I developed a system that learns relational descriptions of web sources, with the aim of automatically integrating them into existing mashups.

Publications

Below are some selected publications of mine. If you can't find the paper you're after please send me a .

Software and Blogs

EIDOS (Efficiently Inducing Definitions for Online Sources) is a system for learning semantic descriptions of online information sources (such as these RSS feeds). The descriptions are used to automatically integrate the sources into (mediator based) information integration systems. A complete description of the purpose and functionality of the system can be found in my thesis. You can also have a look at the slides I presented at my defense. The software can be downloaded from the ISI website. It is royalty-free for research purposes and comes with all the source code. Here is the latest documentation. Feel free to contact me with installation questions.

I have a research blog, which I post my papers, presentations and thoughts to occasionally. Otherwise, I recommend the blogs of a number of other computer science researchers: Greg Linden, Matthew Hurst, Paolo Massa, Jonathan Elsas, Alon Halevy, William Cohen, Panos Ipeirotis.

A very brief Bio

Monash Personal Page Disclaimer
This web page is not authorized by Monash University and any opinions expressed on the page are those of the author and not those of the University.