This document is Amit Goyal's resume. It summarizes his education, research interests and experiences. He is currently a PhD student studying data mining, social networks and machine learning at the University of British Columbia. His research focuses on influence propagation and identifying leaders in social networks. He has worked as a research engineer at Yahoo! and Synopsys, developing tools for automatic online form filling and extracting information from resumes.

1. Amit Goyal University of British Columbia, Vancouver
+1-778-558-0733
goyal4u@gmail.com
http://www.cs.ubc.ca/~goyal
RESEARCH INTERESTS
Data Mining, Social Networks, Information Retrieval, Machine Learning
EDUCATION
Doctoral student (2nd year) in Computer Science, 2007 – Present
University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada
GPA: 3.6/4
Advisor: Prof. Laks V. S. Lakshmanan
Bachelor of Technology in Computer Science, 2001 – 2005
Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, India
CPI: 7.03/10
RESEARCH EXPERIENCES
Influence Propagation and Leaders In Very Large Social Networks
Advisor: Prof. Laks V. S. Lakshmanan
As a part of my dissertation, I am working on mining interesting patterns in Social Networks.
Seeing friends’ actions, users are sometimes tempted to perform those actions. We look into the
problem of studying the propagation of such influence, and on this basis, identifying which users
are leaders when it comes to setting the trend of performing various actions. We developed a
pattern mining based framework to discover leaders from community actions [1], [3]. We also
built a visualization tool known as Gurumine [2] on top of it to visualize propagation of influence
in very large Social Networks.
Currently, we are working on extracting leadership qualities, i.e. what kind of qualities makes a
user leader for what kind of followers for what kind of actions. In addition, we are building a
machine learning based framework to capture influence propagation and predict future actions by
users in Social Networks. We also study how this framework can be useful for solving viral
marketing problems.
Feature Extraction, Automatic Hierarchy Building and Sentiment Analysis of Political
Blogs
Advisor: Prof. Laks V. S. Lakshmanan
In this term paper, we proposed a number of techniques for extracting features, automatic
hierarchy discovery, identification of politicians and political organizations and sentiment analysis
on political blogs. The objective was to automatically generate feature based summary for
arbitrary political issues and what people think about them in context to related politicians.
Automatic Online Form Filling
Yahoo! Bangalore, India
We developed machine learning based automated online form-filling framework for automatically
completing user input controls based on previously stored information. The framework could learn
and infer forms of different natures, and map them to a common schema, thus getting the
semantic interpretation of different form fields irrespective of their layout, language, locale or
vertical [4].
Extracting Information from a Resume
Yahoo! Bangalore, India
We designed a framework to extract important information from a resume. For example, name,
address, skills, education and work experience details etc.
PUBLICATIONS
[1] Amit Goyal, Francesco Bonchi, Laks V.S. Lakshmanan, Discovering Leaders from
Community Actions, In Proc. of the 17th Conference on Information and Knowledge
Management, CIKM 2008, Napa Valley, California, 2008
[2] Amit Goyal, Francesco Bonchi, Laks V.S. Lakshmanan, Byung-Won On, Gurumine: a Pattern
Mining System for Discovering Leaders and Tribes, To appear in Proc. of the 25th Intl.
Conference on Data Engineering, ICDE 2009, Shanghai, China, 2009 (Demo Paper)
PATENTS SUBMITTED
[3] A pattern mining method for viral marketing (Details above)
[4] Automatic Online Form Filling Using Semantic Inference (Details above)

2. SCHOLASTIC ACHIEVEMENTS
• All India Rank 12 among 200,000 students in the Indian Institute of Technology – Joint
Entrance Examination (IIT-JEE) 2001.
• All India Rank 16 in National Science Talent Search Examination in 1999.
• Recipient of the prestigious National Talent Search Examination scholarship awarded by
the Govt. of India. I secured 4th rank in state level exam of the same.
• Secured 9th rank in State Science Talent Search Examination scholarship awarded by the
Govt. of Rajasthan, India in 1999.
• I was awarded certificate of merit, National Top 1% for National Standard Examination in
Mathematics, at Higher Secondary Level (2001).
• Among the top 200 students of the country in the Indian National Physics Olympiad in
2000.
INDUSTRIAL EXPERIENCES
Summer Intern in Yahoo! Sunnyvale (June 2008 – Aug 2008)
• I worked in Advertisement Targeting team, which focus on deriving short term and long term
user interests based on past user activities and thus serve advertisements to them.
• Presented a talk and a hack on Yahoo! Quarterly Hack day. Won Newbie Shine Award (out
of 58 entries) and nominated for people’s choice award (5 out of 58). In this hack, we
developed a chat bot based on Alice, and was integrated to Y! Answers and Y! Messenger.
Senior Research Engineer in Yahoo!, Bangalore (Jan 2006 – July 2007)
• Automatic Online Form Filling (Details above)
• Extracting Information from a Resume (Details above)
Research & Development Engineer I in Synopsys, Bangalore (Sept 2005 – Jan 2006)
• I worked on enhancing performance of different parts of VCS compiler including designing and
building an efficient scheduler. The work required advance knowledge in algorithms, data
structures, memory management and programming.
TECHNICAL SKILLS
Operating Systems Linux, Solaris, BSD, Debian, Macintosh, AIX, Windows
Programming languages C, C++, JAVA, Fortran, Pascal, 8085/8086 Assembly
Scripting Unix Shell, Perl/CGI, PHP, Scheme, Prolog, Haskell, Javascript
Databases SQL, MySQL, Oracle
Others Matlab, XUL, HTML, XML, AJAX, SQL, VHDL, Verilog, Prolog, Perforce, CVS
System Administrator Configuration and maintenance of web/ftp servers, nfs/nis/ldap servers, squid
proxy server, dns server, firewall setup, media streaming server etc.
RELEVANT COURSES (GRADUATE LEVEL)
Data Mining and Machine Learning, Data Management and Mining, Statistical Inference,
Advance Algorithms and Data Structures, Dynamic Programming
EXTRA CURRICULAR ACTIVITIES
• Web Admin, Database Systems Lab, Dept. of Computer Science, UBC (2007-Present).
• Web Admin and Newsletter Editor, Utsav – Indian Students Association, UBC (2008-Present).
• I was one of the 4 members of Middle Layer Committee (MLC) of IIT Bombay (2004-05). It
is a student body which looks after Networking and Computer related issues in the institute.
At the same time, it provides technical assistance to the System Administrators and students.
• I was the System Administrator of Hostel Eight (2004-05) which has around 150
computers. As a System Administrator I had to ensure the proper functioning of LAN of the
hostel and provide technical assistance to the inmates.
• I was the Script Coordinator of PAF (performing arts festival), 2005 for the hostel. PAF is a
one hour long live play involving original script, music, production etc. Usually, it requires one
month hard work of about 100 students to make one PAF.
•I was the Dramatics Secretary of Hostel Eight (2002-03) and participated in various dramatics

3. events like Street Play, Drams, Impromptu etc. We won the cultural trophy in my tenure.