Curriculum Vitae

Abhaya Agarwal
Room 218, Hall 2
Indian Institute of Technology
Kanpur 208016, India
Email: abhayag@iitk.ac.in

Personal Date of Birth: 18th December 1981

Information Sex: Male
Nationality: Indian
Permanent Address: 3/223, Viram Khand, Gomti Nagar, Lucknow 226010

Academic Interests • Natural Language Processing, Machine Translation, Optical character

recognition, document analysis
• Programming languages and systems, virtual machines, compilers
• Distributed systems: analyzing, debugging

Education • Bachelor of Technology in Computer Science and Engineering

Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur (1999-2003) : 9.3/10.0
• Intermediate Examination (Class XII)
Mahanagar Boys’ Inter college, Lucknow (1996-1998) : 80.4%
• High School Examination (Class X)
City Montessori School Mahanagar, Lucknow (1994-1996): 85.6%

Test Scores • GRE General Test

1440 out of 1600 (V 640, Q 800) and 5 on 6 (Analytical writing)
• Toefl
297 out of 300 (Listening : 29, structure/writing: 30, reading: 30)
• GRE Subject Test in Computer Science
Result Awaited
Professional During my undergraduate years, I completed following professional
Courses Courses:
Special Topics in Computer Science (Study of Dynamic Compilation)
Special Topics in Computer Science (Acoustic Digital Communication)
Machine Translation Topics in Operating Systems
Topics in Distributed Systems Neural Networks
Advanced Compiler Optimization Software Engineering
Artificial Intelligence Principles of Database Systems
Theory of Computation Principles of Compiler Design
Computer Networks Programming Tools & Techniques
Principles of Programming Languages Operating Systems
Discrete Mathematics Introduction to Algorithms
Computer Organization Data Structures
Work Experience • Research Associate, Media Lab Asia, Indian Institute of
Technology Kanpur, Kanpur, India ( July ‘03 - present)
Currently working in the BRiCS project in Media Lab Asia on the
development of a visual programming language for various robotics
kits being developed in the project. Also working with Dr. Deepak
Gupta on extending the fast forwarding utility that I developed in my
BTP dissertation, to make it a useful tool for debugging distributed java
programs.
• Instructor, Short Term course on Data Structures and Algorithms,
Department of Computer Science and Engineering, IIT Kanpur
(May ‘03 – June ‘03)
Was one of the instructors for the short term course organized by
Department of computer science for students majoring in other streams.
Duration of the course was 5 weeks. It covered basics of data
structures, dynamic programming and graph algorithms among other
things. I was involved in taking lectures, making question papers and
grading the answer scripts.
• Summer Intern, LIA, EPFL, Lausanne, Switzerland
(May ’02 – July ‘02)
Worked in the Agentcities project which is a collaborative project of
more than 60 universities across the world for establishing an open
agent test bed. My task was to develop an agent based service
involving financial transactions between agents. After discussions,
we decided to implement a p2p Query Answering system in which
agents pay each other for the information they receive. It involved
issues related to p2p search, agent negotiations, trust in a
distributed system and secure financial transactions.

Term Papers • Research Frontiers in Dynamic Compilation Course: Special Topics

in Computer Science
A literature survey in the field of dynamic compilation. Discussed the
current research issues and possible directions of enquiry.
• Definitely (definitely:B) Course: Distributed Systems
Surveyed the existing algorithms for detecting a predicate under
definitely modality and also proposed new algorithms for simple
predicates. The work can lead to a efficient algorithm for detecting
definitely:B for a regular predicate.
• Named Entity Recognition: Language Independent Approaches
Course: Machine Translation
Described and compared three different approaches to named entity
recognition. Also suggested the modification required for adapting
these algorithms to Hindi Language.
• MPI : Pushing the Limits Course: Advanced Compiler Optimizations
Surveyed various efforts related to squeezing maximum performance
out of MPI standards.
Research/ • Compiled the IITK Devanagari Character Database containing 2890
Professional images of handwritten characters from 33 writers. It is the beginning
Activities of an effort at producing a standard database which can be used as a
reference for research in this field.
• Attended Indian Conference on Vision, Graphics and Image
processing at Ahmedabad in December 2002
• I am a student member of ACM

Projects • Handwritten Railway reservation Form processing (January 2002 –

April 2002)
This project was taken up as a course project in AI course under Dr.
Amitabha Mukerjee. Aim was to design a form reading system for
Railway reservation forms that have been filled in Devanagari Script.
This involved Document Segmentation, Field Extraction, Numeral
recognition and Devanagari character recognition. Due to short span
of time, we concentrated on the Field Extraction part and also
managed to train an elementary numeral recognizer using neural
networks.

• Devanagari Character Recognition using Self Organizing Feature

Extraction Methods (July 2002 – November 2002)
The aim was to develop a Devanagari character recognizer for use in
the form reading system already developed. We used the approach
of Extracting higher order features from primitive features by using
Self Organizing Feature Maps. Then these features are fed to a
neural net for recognition. One offshoot of the project was the IITK
Devanagari Character Database of handwritten samples from around
33 writers which is available for free on request.

• Extracting a Bilingual Lexicon for English–Hindi using Statistical

Techniques on Parallel Corpora (February 2003- May 2003)
This project was part of the Machine Translation. The aim of the
project was to extract an English-Hindi lexicon using the parallel
corpora and use that to build a translation system. The project
involved conversion of corpora from html to text, cleaning of corpora
and then breaking of text into sentences. After that we employed a
variant of Church and Gale algorithm to align the parallel corpora.
We incorporated lexical clues along with the sentence length in the
C-G algorithm. For building the translation system, IBM model 3 was
used as the Translation Model while the language model was trigram
based.

• Implementing a tracing and Slicing Utility for the Distributed Java

Programs (July 2002 – May 2003)
This project was my B.Tech. project under the guidance of Dr.
Deepak Gupta and Dr. Vijay Garg. The aim here was to develop a
fast forwarding utility for the Distributed java programs using slicing.
Slicing for sequential programs is an old concept which is very
helpful in debugging programs. On the similar lines, for distributed
programs, idea of Computational slicing has been proposed by Dr.
Garg. The idea is to detect the violation of some critical conditions
 which are specified by the programmer, during the execution of
program. We first record the computation, than compute its slice
with respect to given conditions and finally replay the computation,
this time stopping at those points where the specified condition is
true. This allows programmers to quickly go through the states
where there may be some bug in the program. The tool is a first
step towards providing efficient distributed data break points. it is
available for public download.

• JILC: Java (bytecode) to IL (bytecode) Compiler (January 2002 – April

2002)
The aim of the project was to develop a compiler that takes Java
class file as input and outputs a .Net executable. This involved in
depth study of the JVM and CLI Instruction Sets, structure of .class
files, layout of the PE files (Windows executables) and mapping
these things.

• Acoustic Digital Communication (January 2002 – April 2002)

This project was taken up as a independent study (CS397) under Dr.
Deepak Gupta. We designed and implemented a sound based digital
communication system. In this we used sound waves to carry the
digital information instead of radio waves using Frequency
modulation. We implemented host of algorithms and in the end were
able to transfer strings of text from one computer to other. We
wanted to develop a sound based communication system between a
computer and mobile phone which has a sim card inside it. This
system would then be used for authentication. The project gave us a
chance to study the signal processing and grapple with device
internals.

• Implementation of Secure Online Form Submission System (May 2001-

july 2001)
We developed an online form submission and processing system for the
M.Tech. admissions in CSE department. The system is in use at the
Computer Science Department.

• Client for playing Scotland Yard Game (March 2001- April 2001)
The aim was to write a computer program that “plays” the game of
Scotland Yard. It had to compete with other similar players. Our player
ended up 3rd among total 20. It was beaten only by the winners.

• Enhancement of NachOS operating system (September 2001 –

November 2001)
As part of the Operating Systems course, implemented various
enhancements into the kernel of NachOS (an instructional operating
system). Enhancements included – locks and condition variables,
multi-programming and scheduling implementation and demand
paging.

• Other Small projects

- Implementation of strace utility using /proc file system on solaris
 platform (January 2003 – April 2003)
- Implementation of a RRT based motion planner for a non-
holonomic car like robot (ICFP programming contest 2003, June
2003)
- Implementation of finger utility using RPC Course: Computer
Networks
- Implementation of a command shell Course : Operating Systems
- User level TCP implementation over UDP sockets Course :
Computer Networks
- Applet for simulating heap operations (December 2000)

Academic Awards • I along with two others participated in ACM ICPC 2001, Regional
and achievements Contest at Kanpur site and stood 2nd out of total 70 teams from all
over India and abroad.
• Won the programming contest at Avishkar - 2001 which is a
National level technical Festival of MLNR
• Award for academic excellence for year 1999-2000 at IIT Kanpur
• Ranked 26th out of over 100000 candidates in the entrance
examination conducted by IIT
• Recipient of National Talent Search Scholarship

Extra -Curricular • Have served on a number of public posts including the President of
activities and my hall of Residence and member of election council among others
achievements • Have been associated with Institute Counseling service for 3 years
as student guide and special volunteer, helping out new students.
• Have been actively involved in the organization of Institute
Festivals. I was a part of the core team of Techkriti 2003.
• Have won many Debates and Extempore contests both at school and
college level
• Served on the Editorial Board (Hindi Section) of the Gymkhana
Magazine called Meander.
• Apart from computer science, I have great interest in history of
mathematics, philosophy, astronomy and Hindi literature.
I hereby declare that the above information is true to the best of my
knowledge.
Abhaya Agarwal