Computer Science Engineer

IN THE NAME OF ALLAH THE MERCIFUL THE GRACIOUS

ZAREEN SABA SYED

Phone # 514-***-****

Address: Apt. 14, 7815 Av. Mountain Sights, Montreal, QC H4P 2B1, Canada

Email: **********@*****.***

OBJECTIVE: Research, Explore, Innovate and Implement Scalable Solutions for Extracting

Actionable Insights from Big Data

SUMMARY:

Research and Development Experience at Microsoft Research (MSR) WA, USA (2008, 2009)

PhD. (Information Retrieval) from University of Maryland Baltimore County, USA (2010)

Fulbright Fellow to the United States for PhD Program (2006-2010)

Awarded Gold Medal in Masters in Computer Science (2004)

Excellent communication and organization skills with Project Management experience

Excellent analytical and problem solving skills

Self-starter, Motivated, Goal Oriented and a Fast Learner

EXPERTISE:

Information Retrieval, Text/Data Mining, Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing, Semantic

Web, Distributed Computing

CORPORA & RESOURCES:

Wikipedia, DBpedia, Freebase, Wordnet, YAGO, Linked Open Data, PubMed Dumps, Drugbank

dataset, Diseasome dataset

TOOLS & TECHNOLOGIES:

Java, C#, Lucene, Solr, Matlab, Weka, Carrot2, OpenNLP, Lingpipe, Hadoop, Amazon Web Services

(AWS), AWS Elastic Map Reduce, Jena RDF Framework, SQL, Linux, Windows, SVN, Git

EDUCATION:

2006 – 2010

PhD. Computer Science (Information Retrieval)

University of Maryland, Baltimore County Maryland, USA

C.G.P.A: 3.89/4.0

MS leading to PhD. (Computer Science) (discontinued) 2003 -2005

National University of Computer and Emerging Sciences -FAST Islamabad, Pakistan

C.G.P.A: 3.67/4.0

Masters in Computer Science 2001-2003

Barani Institute of Information Technology, UAAR Rawalpindi, Pakistan

C.G.P.A: 3.88/4.0

WORK EXPERIENCE:

Software Developer/Researcher Mar/2013- present

North Side Inc. Quebec, Canada

Working on Information Extraction from lexical semantic resources

Developing approaches for improving NLP pipeline

Developing API’s for lexical semantic resources

Research Engineer/Consultant Aug/2012-Feb/2013

EventSQ Virginia, USA

Worked on a Social Search & Networking Application (aqqin.com)

Designed and Developed approaches for:

Modeling user interests

Providing personalized recommendations & Relevance tuning

Tools & Technologies: Apache Solr, Lucene, Java, Resful Web Services, Github, Jira

Research Engineer/Consultant Aug/2012-Mar/2013

BigPeep California, USA

Designed and Implemented Machine Learning algorithms for:

Hierarchical Classification and Clustering of textual documents

Hierarchical Query Guided Clustering

Hybrid Clustering Algorithm distributed over Hadoop Map Reduce on Amazon Cloud

Tools and Technologies: Apache Solr, Lucene, Hadoop, Amazon Web Services, Amazon

Elastic Map Reduce, Jena RDF, Java, Carrot2

Project Lead Jul/2011- Mar/2013

Interactive Group Islamabad, Pakistan

Conceived, Supervised and Managed a product for Enterprise Search and Discovery

Developed Product Vision, Product Road Map, Project Plan

Lead the team over complete SDLC following Agile Practices

Designed and Implemented core Analytics Modules:

Document Concept Prediction

Named Entity Recognition

Keyword Extraction

Taxonomy and Classification

Sentiment Analysis

Tools & Technologies: Apache Solr, Lucene, OpenNLP, Apache Tika, Java, Redmine, SVN

Assistant Professor Aug/2010- July/2011

National University of Computer & Emerging Sciences-FAST Karachi, Pakistan

Courses Taught: Information Retrieval & Text Mining, Bioinformatics

Research Intern Jun/2009- Sep/2009

Microsoft Research (MSR Redmond) Washington, USA

Developed and implemented a system for Relation Discovery.

Research Intern Dec/2008- Apr/2009

RiverGlass Inc. Illinois, USA

Developed and implemented algorithms for improving precision and recall for an IR system.

Research Intern May/2008-Aug/2008

Microsoft Research (MSR Redmond) Washington, USA

Developed algorithms, as well as designed and engineered a system for Information Extraction.

PhD Researcher Aug/2006-Aug/2010

University of Maryland Baltimore County Maryland, USA

Designed and developed a hybrid knowledge base “Wikitology”, unifying structured and unstructured

data (implemented over Apache Lucene) with over 2 million concepts

Developed novel KB-based approaches for solving a variety of problems in Information Retrieval and

Extraction:

Document Concept Prediction

Named Entity Linking to KB Entities

Cross Document Co-reference Resolution

Ontology Discovery

Making sense of tabular data by linking tables to KB

Tools & Technologies: Apache Lucene, Java, Weka, LingPipe (NLP), Jena RDF

Lecturer Feb/2006-Jul/2006

International Islamic University Islamabad, Pakistan

Courses Taught: Data Structures, Computational Phylogenetics

Lecturer Nov/2003-Jan/2006

Federal Urdu University of Arts, Science and Technology Islamabad, Pakistan

Courses Taught: Design and Theory of Algorithms, Data Structures and Analysis of

Algorithms, Digital Logic and Design

Visiting Lecturer Feb/2005-May/2005

Muhammad Ali Jinnah University Islamabad, Pakistan

Courses Taught: Computational Biology/Bioinformatics

Supervised an award winning project on Protein Visualization

Programmer Mar/2003-Nov/2003

Al-Shifa Trust Eye Hospital Rwp., Pakistan

Analyzed, Designed and Implemented different modules in Hospital Information System

RESEARCH PUBLICATIONS:

Z. Syed and T. Finin. 2011. Creating and Exploiting a Hybrid Knowledge Base for Linked Data . In

Proceedings of AGENTS AND ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE, Communications in Computer and

Information Science, 2011, Volume 129, Part 1, 3 -21, DOI: 10.1007/978-3-642-19890-8_1

Z. Syed, T. Finin, V. Mulwad and A. Joshi. 2010. Exploiting a Web of Semantic Data for Interpreting

Tables. In: Proceedings of the WebSci10: Extending the Frontiers of Society On -Line, April 26-27th,

2010, Raleigh, NC: US.

Z. Syed and E. Viegas. 2010. A hybrid approach to unsupervised relation discovery based on linguistic

analysis and semantic typing. In Proceedings of the NAACL HLT 2010 (FAM-LbR '10). ACL,

Stroudsburg, PA, USA, 105-113.

Z. Syed and T. Finin. 2010. Unsupervised techniques for discovering ontology elements from Wikipedia

article links. In Proceedings of the NAACL HLT 2010 (FAM-LbR '10). ACL, Stroudsburg, PA, USA,

78-86.

Z. Syed and T. Finin. 2010. Approaches for Automatically Enriching Wikipedia. In Proc. of the AAAI -

2010 Workshop on Collaborativel y-built Knowledge Sources and Artificial Intelligence, 40-47.

Z. Syed and Evelyne Viegas. 2010. Automatic Discovery of Semantic Relations using MindNet. In

Proc. of Language Resource Evaluation Conference (LREC’2010).

T. Finin and Z. Syed. 2010. Creating and Exploiting a Web of Semantic Data. In Proc. of the Second

International Conference on Agents and Artificial Intelligence.

T. Finin, Z. Syed, J. Mayfield, P. McNamee, and C. Piatko.2009. Using Wikitology for Cross-Document

Entity Coreference Resolution", Proceedings of the AAAI Spring Symposium on Learning by Reading

and Learning to Read.

V. Mulwad, T. Finin, Z. Syed, and A. Joshi. 2010. Using linked data to interpret tables. In proceedings

of the the First International Workshop on Consuming Linked D ata, November 2010, USA.

V. Mulwad, T. Finin, Z. Syed, and A. Joshi. 2010. T2LD: Interpreting and Representing Tables as

Linked Data. In proceedings of the Poster and Demonstration Session at the 9th International Semantic

Web Conference, CEUR Workshop Proceedings, November 2010, USA.

J. Mayfield, D. Alexander, B. Dorr, J. Eisner, T. Elsayed, T. Finin, C. Fink, M. Freedman, N. Garera, P.

McNamee, S. Mohammad, D. Oard, C. Piatko, A. Sayeed, Z. Syed, R. Weischedel. 2009. “Cross-

Document Coreference Resolution: A Key Technology for Learning by Reading”, AAAI 2009 Spring

Symposium on Learning by Reading a nd Learning to Read, USA.

Z. Syed and T. Finin. 2009. Wikitology: A Novel Hybrid Knowledge Base derived from Wikipedia. In

Proc. of the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing Conference, October 2009, USA.

(Poster)

Z. Syed and T. Finin. 2008. Wikitology: Wikipedia as an ontology. In Proc. of the Grace Hopper

Celebration of Women in Computing Conference, October 2008, USA. (Poster)

Z. Syed, T. Finin and A. Joshi. 2008. Wikipedia as an Ontology for Describing Documents. In Proc. of

the International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media. USA.

HONORS & AWARDS: (WITH THE GRACE OF ALLAH)

Fulbright Scholarship awarded for PhD studies in USA (2006 – 2010)

Gold Medal awarded in Masters in Computer Science (2004)

Topped in all semesters in Masters in Computer Science (2001-2003)

Merit Scholarship won twice during undergraduate studies (1997 -1998)

Won Outstanding Poster Presentation award at Graduate Researc h Conference, UMBC (2010)

Ranked 2nd in Poster Competition at CSEE Research Review, UMBC (2010)

Awarded Grace Hopper Scholarship for Women in Computing ( 2008, 2009, 2010)

Best Teacher of the Year Award, Am-Anglo School, Peshawar Road, Rwp., Pakistan (1997 )

Topped in FSc. in Sir Syed Science College, Rawalpindi, Pakistan (1996)

SERVICE:

Program committee member for AAAI-2013, USA (2013)

Senator for Graduate Student Association (GSA), UMBC (2008 -2009)

Secretary for Women in Science and Engineering (WISE), UMBC (2008-2009)

REFERENCES:

Dr. Tim Finin, Professor, University of Maryland Baltimore County, MD, USA.

Dr. Evelyne Viegas, Senior Research Program Manager, Microsoft Research, WA, USA.

Contact this candidate