Updates
Apr 2021
- We have not formally kicked off the counseling program for Fall 2022 yet. Check back here for updates or send us a mail to be added to our list of interested applicants.
Nov 2019
- We're already at full capacity for Fall 2020 Personal Admissions Counseling and most likely won't be able to take any more applicants for this year. Before making the recommended donation, please send us a mail to confirm availability.
Aug 2019
- Personal Admissions Counseling for Fall 2020 is now open. Contact me to confirm availability.
Jul 2018
- Personal Admissions Counseling for Fall 2019 is now open. Contact me to confirm availability.
Jun 2017
- Personal Admissions Counseling for Fall 2018 is now open. Contact me to confirm availability.
Dec 2016
- Update on Personal Admissions Counseling for a Good Cause: Counseling for Fall 2017 has now ended. I'll start counseling for 2018 applicants sometime early next year.
Dec 2015
- Update on Personal Admissions Counseling for a Good Cause: Counseling for Fall 2016 has now ended. I already have my hands full with those who've already signed up for the program and I don't intend to take any more prospective applicants for counseling this year. Like previous years, I regret that I couldn't respond to everyone who contacted me or revert to everyone on the wait-list. I'll start counseling for 2017 applicants sometime early next year.
Nov 2015
- Update on Personal Admissions Counseling for a Good Cause: I am fast approaching the limit on the number of applicants I can counsel simultaneously for Fall 2016 admissions. So before making your Helpage India donation for signing up for the programme, please do reach out to me to ensure I can still help you with your graduate school applications this year.
June 2015
- Xue Feng, a PhD candidate at MIT, advised by Jim Glass is interning with our Speech Sciences team at Microsoft Silicon Valley. Xue will be mentored by me and working on improving our speech recognition models for voice-based Bing search and Cortana.
- I will be starting counseling for Fall 2016 admissions from mid-July. If you're interested in enrolling in Personal Admissions Counseling for a Good Cause, reach out to me in July.
February 2015
- Sachin, Rahul and Atul have put together a really cool concept video for their project (named "EduTick") at NITC. Check it out at GoAnimate.
January 2015
- I am mentoring three third-year students (Sachin Sany, Rahul Gadi and Atul Golchha) from NIT Calicut in a class project for the sixth semester course on "Software Engineering" taught by Dr. Vinod Pathari. The goal of the project is to create a web-based platform for admission counselors and students to interact with each other in an efficient manner.
December 2014
- Personal admissions counseling for Fall 2015 has now ended. Like last year, I regret the fact that I wasn't able to respond to everyone who contacted me or revert to everyone on the wait-list. Prospective applicants are now enrolling in the programme earlier than ever. I opened up enrollment for Fall 2015 counseling around April of this year and I already had my hands full by the end of June. I owe a big thanks to Swati Padmanabhan (who some of you may remember as one of the reviewers of my DAGAP paper) for agreeing to share the couseling load with me. Together, we were able to help out more students than I could have alone. For now, I will be taking a short break and returning to counseling for 2016 admissions sometime early next year.
November 2014
- I now have a coprocessor from Intel - Harini Jambunathan :)
September 2014
- Owing to the number of prospective applicants who've already signed up for the programme, and my own time constraints, I am currently closing the Fall 2015 admissions counseling to new intake. If you're interested, do reach out to me though and I'll add you to a wait-list and get back to you when I have more time to spare.
April 2014
- While a lot of my work revolved around speech recognition in Kinect for Xbox One last year, this year, it's been all about Cortana. Here's a blog post detailing how Bing is powering the new personal assistant in Windows Phone.
- I will be getting back to admissions counseling for Fall 2015 this May. If you're interested in enrolling in Personal Admissions Counseling for a Good Cause, feel free to reach out to me for more details.
December 2013
- I am no longer taking new students for personal admissions counseling for Fall 2014. I regret that I couldn't get back to everyone who had contacted me
in this regard. A few had already made the charitable donation even before getting in touch with me, and I really appreciate that gesture. But compared to earlier years,
I got swamped much faster this year since interested aspirants started signing up pretty early. In fact, as early as September, I had reached a stage where I was counseling more
than 10 students simultaneously. In the end, I could manage to work with 19 different applicants in total, but I had to turn an equal number (or even more) away,
since I just wouldn't have been able to keep up with all of them.
For now, I plan to take a break for a little while and get back to 2015 admissions counseling sometime in the first half of next year. I'll update this page then.
September 2012
- I am now a part of the Conversational Understanding team (within Bing Information Platform) at Microsoft. Our team works on improving speech recognition models and delivering improved speech-enabled conversational interfaces on Microsoft products such as Xbox Kinect and Windows Phone.
March 2012
After 20 months in Microsoft Office division's Natural Language Group (NLG), I am taking up a new role as a Research Software Development Engineer in the Natural Language Platform team of Bing in Microsoft's Silicon Valley campus.
At NLG, I worked on improvements to the existing language and proofing tools in the MS Office suite and developed new writing assistance features to enhance the proofing experience in Office 2013.
In my new role in Bing, I will be reporting to Principal Researcher Lead, Ron Kaplan and working on shallow parsing and linguistic analysis of web queries, with the aim to improve search relevance.
February 2012
- I once again gave a webinar on "Demystifying the American Graduate Admissions Process" at my alma mater, NIT Calicut on Wednesday, 22nd February 2012. A special thanks to Dr. Vineeth Paleri for attending the talk and encouraging the students of the computer science department to consider higher studies beyond their Bachelors program.
August 2011
- As part of the series of talks organized by the ISTE chapter at NIT Calicut, I am repeating my webinar from March on "Demystifying the American Graduate Admissions Process" at NITC on Sunday, 21st August 2011. This time around, the audience purely comprises of first year students and hence the focus is on increasing their awareness regarding the US admissions process and the things they need to keep in mind during their undergraduate studies.
June 2011
- A new and improved version of the Stanford Deterministic Coreference Resolution System is now available for download as part of the latest update to Stanford CoreNLP (v1.1.0).
May 2011
- A beta public release of the Stanford Phrasal open source machine translation package is now available.
March 2011
- I am giving a webinar on "Demystifying the American Graduate Admissions Process" at NIT Calicut on Thursday, 31st March 2011. More details here [PDF].
January 2011
Current students and alumni of NITC who are interested in pursuing graduate studies in the US should consider joining the Facebook group "NITC -> MS/PhD". It is a group run by NITC alumni in the US for providing guidance to aspirants from NITC on a variety of topics related to American graduate studies and admissions. For those more inclined in taking the MBA route, join the "NITC -> MBA" group that is managed by my fellow alumni friends.
November 2010
- Our work on "Improving Vision through Dialog" got accepted for inclusion in the proceedings of the AAAI 2010 Fall Symposium on "Dialog with Robots". The paper was presented at the symposium held at Arlington, Virginia in the second week of November.
October 2010
- Our coreference resolution system is now available for download as part of the larger Stanford CoreNLP package.
- Our recent work on coreference resolution got accepted for inclusion in the proceedings of the 2010 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing. Out of a total 500 submissions, there were 125 accepted papers (25%), from which 70 (14%) were chosen to be presented orally (including ours) and 55 (11%) as posters. I presented our paper at the conference held at MIT, Massachusetts in the second week of October.
August 2010
- Earlier this year, I was fortunate enough to be a part of the 2010 Masters Admissions committee at Stanford Computer Science. It was a great opportunity to get an inside view of the admissions process at a top graduate school. I at last finished penning down my experience about the same in a document titled "Demystifiying the American Graduate Admissions Process". More details here.
July 2010
I joined the Natural Language Group (NLG) of Microsoft Office as a Software Development Engineer at Microsoft Corporation, Redmond. The NLG
works on natural language tools like the orthographic spellchecker, context-sensitive spellchecker, grammar checker, etc. for the different MS Office products.
June 2010
- After a year and a half at The Farm, I graduated with a Master of a Science in Computer Science (specializing in Artificial Intelligence), with a Distinction in Research in Natural Language Processing. I was one among the eight students (in a graduating batch of 147), who were awarded Distinction in Research by the Computer Science Department.
- Coming soon for download as part of JavaNLP: Stanford's phrase-based machine translation system, Phrasal
April 2010
Stefan Krawczyk and I presented our work on SMS Text Normalization in the PhD poster session of the Computer Forum Affiliates Annual Meeting on Wednesday, April 28, 2010. We also demoed an online interface to our tool.
As part of Stanford's annual Splash! program, I taught an introductory class on natural language processing to school kids, titled "Teaching Languages to Machines" on Saturday, April 17, 2010. The lecture slides from the class are available here.
March 2010
- The final posters from a really cool course (EDUC 396X: The Design of Technologies for Casual Learning) that I took in Winter 2010 are available here.
Sept 2009
- At the start of Fall 2009, I was made the customer support admin for all the software distributed by the Stanford NLP Group. These are handy statistical NLP toolkits for various computational linguistics problems and I would definitely recommend anyone working on NLP-based projects to take a look at them. The tools include a parser, a part-of-speech tagger, a named-entity recognizer and a maximum entropy classifier among others (see full list).
June 2009
- Students in CS224N always come up with a lot of exciting class projects, but Twitter Sentiment and Stanford SMS Translator are my favorite ones from this year. The full list of projects is here.
- The course on Natural Language Processing (CS224N), taught by Chris Manning is a popular AI class at Stanford. Lectures and course materials from last year's class (2008 session) are available on Stanford Engineering Everywhere (SEE).
