Computer Science University

Jonathan Siddharth

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

http://www.infolab.stanford.edu/~jonsid

Ph: 650-***-****

Objective:

To build products and services that solve problems relating to Information Retrieval,

Web Search and Content Discovery using techniques from Machine Learning, Data Mining, Text

Mining and Natural Language Processing.

Education:

Stanford University: 2007

MS in Computer Science with Distinction in Research, Artificial Intelligence Specialization

Best Masters Thesis Award in Computer Science, Stanford University (Christofer Stephenson

Memorial Award for Graduate Research)

SVCE, Anna University: 2005

Bachelor of Engineering in Computer Science & Engineering (First Class with Distinction).

1st Rank out of Graduating batch of 133 students in Computer Science

Work & Research Experience:

Founder -Infoaxe Inc.: Web History Search, Social Network & Real-time Search Engine:

Jan-08 to Present

Infoaxe is a web browsing history powered Search and Discovery Engine with over 4M users

from over 200 countries. Founded the company in 2008 along with my co-founder Vijay

Krishnan. I co-designed and built several key technology components including the Infoaxe Web

History Search Engine, Infoaxe Friend Share, Infoaxe Real-time Search Engine and the Infoaxe

Recommendation Engine. Raised $3.9M in funding for Infoaxe from Draper Fisher Jurvetson,

Labrador Ventures, Band of Angels, Amidzad Partners and Stephen Oskoui(Smiley Media).

Infoaxe Web History Search Engine:

Infoaxe s Web History Search Engine automatically saves and indexes every web page a user

browses, across all the different computers and browsers she uses so that she can search

previously visited web pages from any computer. I co-invented the Real-time Indexing system for

Infoaxe s search engine that has been instrumental in scaling the backend to index 20M web

pages a day. I also co-developed the Personalized ranking algorithms for the Infoaxe Search

Engine that leverage implicit cues for ranking web pages like attention data, frequency and

recency of page visits etc.

Jerusalem Post: Desktop: Making History http://www.jpost.com/Home/Article.aspx?id=123038

Infoaxe Friend Share:

Built a real-time passive sharing feature that lets users share pages they browse on specific sites

with friends via an asymmetric Twitter-like Follower/Following model.

Infoaxe Real-time Search Engine:

Built a Real-time search Engine that leverages the aggregate attention data generated by the Web

History Search Engine to build a fresher Web Search Engine that outperforms Google on several

query categories like commercial (products, gadgets, deals, coupons etc), entertainment (movies,

sitcoms, e-books) and current events. Launch covered by NY Times, CNN, TechCrunch etc.

http://www.nytimes.com/external/venturebeat/2009/11/20/20venturebeat-infoaxe--a-real-time-

search-engine-that-does-53994.html

Infoaxe Recommendation Engine:

Co-invented a recommendation engine for content that analyzes a user s web browsing data,

attention data and social graph to recommend interesting and relevant pages to users based on

his/her interests.

Infoaxe has been covered by major media outlets and technology blogs worldwide including the

NY Times, CNN, BBC, ABC News, The Jerusalem Post, The Hindu, TechCrunch, VentureBeat,

GigaOm etc. http://www.infoaxe.com/press.html

Scientist (Ranking & Search Relevance) - Powerset Inc. :Natural Language Search

(Acquired by Microsoft for rumored $100M) Aug 07 to Jan-08

Co-designed the Ranking algorithm for Powerset s Natural Language Search Engine bringing

Natural Language Understanding to Web Search. Built ranking features derived from deep

Natural Language Processing on text including syntactic parsing (via PARC's Xerox Linguistic

Environment (XLE)), semantic analysis, morphological analysis, lexical and ontological

resources like WordNet, FreeBase and state of the art information retrieval techniques. Combined

ranking features to formulate the ranking function. Led several statistical tests on Mechanical

Turk to evaluate search relevance relative to competing search engines and iteratively improved

the Ranking algorithm which outperformed Google, Yahoo & Live Web Search Engines on the

AOL query set and other query sets for the Wikipedia corpus. Designed a Machine Learned

Ranking function using Gradient Boosted Decision Trees. Made significant contributions to

Powerset IP which helped the company s eventual acquisition by Microsoft for a rumored

$100M.

Summer Internship: Yahoo! Search Relevance and Machine Learned Ranking Group,

Yahoo! Inc.: Summer '06

A. Search Regionalization (Region/Language Mixing in Search Relevance)

Added automatic search regionalization to Yahoo! Search (Inktomi). Encoded a ranking feature

that captured whether a user was interested in local content or global content. Performed Query

classification on Clickstream data to identify Query classes where search users preferred local

content to global content and used that to train a new ranking algorithm. Tests indicated a 3%

gain in DCG (Discounted Cumulative Gain). Resulted in huge gains in search relevance in

several international markets for Yahoo! Search.

B. Context Driven Ranking:

Improving search relevance by obtaining more context (contextually related words)

automatically for the search query, weighting it appropriately and using it to improve search

relevance on the Discounted Cumulative Gain metric. Eg. For the search query "photography",

contextually related words would be "pictures", "camera","film" etc. The presence of these

contextually related words in a document is scored positively for relevance to the query.

Research Assistant -Stanford Infolab, Computer Science Department, Stanford University:

Fall 06, Winter 06, Spring 07

(Advisors: Dr.Andreas Paepcke and Prof. Hector Garcia Molina)

a. Language Model Based Ranking for IR:

Worked on a suite of methods to improve recall and precision for Text based

Information Retrieval by using a generative model of the Postings list.

b. Web Page Classification:

Worked on Bayesian and SVM based classification of news articles as part of the Web

Sociologists Workbench Project at Stanford to help Web Sociologists mine the web for collecting

aggregate statistics of online media coverage of special events like the California Special

Election, Hurricane Katrina etc.

c. Web Page duplicate detection

Designed an algorithm for near duplicate detection in extremely large Web Page Collections.

Improved on existing state of the art methods like shingling and I-Match by more than 24% in

combined precision and recall and is faster by a factor of 3 at execution time. Published at

SIGIR 08 and is currently an open source Sourceforge project. SpotSigs has been added to the

computer science curriculum for a course at Duke University.

Research Assistant -Project Based Learning Lab, Stanford University:

(Advisor: Dr.Renate Fruchter)

Fall 05, Winter 05, Spring 06

a. Hierarchical Enterprise Search:

Built a Hierarchical Text Search Engine for the enterprise to allow searching for results at various

granularities and which also leverages the information inherent in the nodes in the hierarchy for

ranking of results.

b. Hierarchical Search Results Visualization with a Map Metaphor:

Implemented a TreeMap Visualization of the search results for the above Search Engine to allow

visualization of the results at multiple levels of granularity by allowing users to zoom in and

zoom out to facilitate easier navigation.

c. Community Image Sharing Engine:

Implemented an Image sharing System that lets users share images on their Desktop with other

users currently logged in on different computers.

Other Research Projects at Stanford:

a. SQUINT: A Support Vector Machine (SVM) based approach to score sections of a web

page based on relevance to a query to let users navigate quicker to the most relevant section

of a web search result.

b. Turkalator: A Statistical Machine Translation System for Turkish that accounts for the

unique features of an agglutinative language.

Research Assistant -Directed Undergraduate Research, SVCE, Anna University: (Advisor:

Prof. Srinivasan) (2002-05)

a. Autonomous Navigation of Vehicles using Neural Networks

b. Neural Network based Evidence Combination for Medical Diagnosis

c. Swarm Intelligence for Task Allocation in Grid Computing

d. Task Allocation Algorithms for Mesh Computing

Some Relevant Stanford Courses:

a. Machine Learning (CS229) Prof. Andrew Ng.

b. Text Retrieval and Web Search (CS276) Prof. Chris Manning and Dr. Prabhakar

Raghavan.

c. Natural Language Processing (CS224N) Prof. Chris Manning.

d. Probabilistic Models in Artificial Intelligence (CS228) Prof. Daphne Koller.

e. Computational Methods for Data mining (CME340) Prof. Sep Kamvar.

f. Transaction Processing and Distributed Databases (CS347) Prof. Hector Garcia-Molina.

g. Independent Research Prof. Hector Garcia-Molina and Dr. Andreas Paepcke.

Scholarships & Awards:

2007 Christofer Stephenson Memorial Award for Graduate Research Awarded for

Best Masters Thesis in Computer Science, Stanford University.

2007 Masters in Computer Science with Distinction in Research

Departmental Honor in Computer Science, Stanford University.

2006 Research Assistantship Award by Stanford Infolab, Department of Computer

Science at Stanford University Full tuition waiver and Stipend.

2005 Research Assistantship Award by Project based learning Lab at Stanford

University Full tuition waiver and Stipend.

2005 Bharat Petroleum Scholarship- Awarded to 15 students in India for Graduate

studies.

2004 Computer Science Departmental Scholarship- 1st in the CS Department

out of 133 students. Tuition Fee Waiver.

Merit Award- 1st Rank in 8th Semester, SVCE, Anna University.

2005

2005 Best Paper Award for Senior thesis Research Project - A Comprehensive

Architectural Framework for Task Management in Scalable Computational Grids

using Swarm Intelligence. (Abacus 05 National level Tech Symposium at Anna

University).

Merit Award- 1st Rank in 6th Semester, SVCE, Anna University.

2004

CAT Prize- 1st Rank in Continuous Assessment tests, Semesters 5,6,7,8

2002-05

SVCE, Anna University.

2001 Merit Scholarship Admission to SVCE, Anna University.

2001 National Scholarship by State Government of TamilNadu, Std. 12.

1996-01 Lucas TVS Scholarship- for each of the years from 1996 to 2001 for placing first

among Lucas TVS Employees in High School and Undergraduate studies.

1999 Best Outgoing Student Award by Lions Club, Std. 10.

Other Academic Honors:

1st Rank among graduating batch of 133, in the CS Department, SVCE,

2005

Anna University.

1st Rank, 8th Semester, SVCE, Anna University.

2005

1st Rank, 6th Semester, SVCE, Anna University.

2004

1st Rank, Continuous Assessment Tests, Semesters 5, 6, 7,8 SVCE, Anna

2002-05

University.

2001 Top 1% in Higher Secondary Examination, Std. 12.

1st Rank out of 150 students, Common Examination, Std. 11.

2000

1st Rank, High School - Mathematics, Physics, Chemistry, Biology, Eng.

1999 - 01

Publications:

1. SpotSigs: robust and efficient near duplicate detection in large web collections.

Theobald, M., Siddharth, J., and Paepcke, A. 2008. In Proceedings of the 31st Annual

international ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in information

Retrieval (Singapore, Singapore, July 20 - 24, 2008). SIGIR '08. ACM, New York, NY, 563-570.

DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1390334.1390431

2. SpotSigs: Near Duplicate Detection in Web Page Collections . Masters Thesis Report,

Department of Computer Science, Stanford University. Won the Christofer Stephenson Award

for Best Masters Thesis.

3. Sentient Autonomous Vehicle using Advanced Neural net Technology, Proceedings of the

IEEE International Conference on Cybernetics and Intelligent Systems - CIS 2004 organized by

IEEE Systems, Man, and Cybernetics Society, ISBN 0-7803-8644-2, Dec 1-3,2004,Singapore.

4. A Minimal Fragmentation Algorithm for Task Allocation in Mesh-Connected

Multicomputers, Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Advances in Intelligent

Systems - Theory and Applications -AISTA 2004 in cooperation with IEEE Computer Society,

IEEE Press, ISBN 2-9599-7768-8,15-18 Nov 2004, Luxembourg, Western Europe.

5. Knowledge Discovery in Clinical databases with Neural Network Evidence Combination,

Proceedings of 2nd IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Sensing and Information

Processing - ICISIP 2005 organized by University of Melbourne and co-sponsored by IEEE

Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society, IEEE Press, ISBN 0-7803-8840-2, pp.512, Jan 4-

7, 2005, Chennai, India.

6. A System for Power-aware Agent-based Intrusion Detection in Wireless Ad Hoc Networks,

Proceedings of Springer Verlag LNCS, 2005 International Conference on Computer Networks

and Mobile Computing - ICCNMC 2005, Zhangjiajie, China, Aug 2005.

7. A Comprehensive Architectural Framework for Task Management in Scalable Computational

Grids - Best Paper Award - Abacus 2005, an Annual National level technical symposium

conducted by the Computer Science and Engineering Association of the Department of Computer

Science and Engineering (DCSE), College of Engineering, Anna University, March 14-15,2005,

Chennai, TN, India.

8. A Two Tier Neural inter-network based approach to Medical Diagnosis using k-Nearest

Neighbor Classification for Diagnosis pruning. Proceedings of International Conference on Bio-

medical Engineering, ICBME 05, Singapore endorsed by IEEE Engineering in Medicine &

Biology Society & the IEEE.

Technical Skill Set:

Programming Languages: Java, C++, C.

Scripting Languages: Shell Scripting, JSP, PHP, Javascript, Perl, Ruby.

Databases and related skills: MySQL, Oracle Postgres, JDBC.

Assembly Languages: 8085, MASM (8086), interfacing with input/output devices.

Internet: HTML, XML, XSL, DHTML, CSS.

Other Skills & Software familiar with: XML Beans, C#, Lucene, Nutch, Heritrix, Matlab, R.

Most recently used: Java, JSP, MySQL running on Linux. Work with Apache Web Server and

Tomcat as the Servlet container.

Invited Talks:

Spoke on Panel at Silicon Valley Code Camp 2010 titled Creating the next Google

(http://www.siliconvalley-

codecamp.com/Sessions.aspx?ForceSortBySessionTime=true&AttendeeId=426)

Spoke on Panel on Entrepreneurship for Engineers at Stanford University.

Spoke at Semantic SIG organized by SD Forum presenting Infoaxe.

Gave a talk on the Architecture of a modern Web Search Engine at Kruzade 09

National Technical Symposium organized by PSG College of Technology, Coimbatore,

India.

Gave a talk on Web Search Engine Design and Challenges at SVCE, Anna University in

Jan 10 (http://cs.svce.ac.in/images/MrSiddharthJonathan/index.html)

Other Responsibilities and Positions held:

Computer Science Masters Admissions Committee, Stanford University.

International Student Advisor, Computer Science Bechtel International Center,

Stanford University

Computer Science Masters Student Advisor Stanford University

IEEE Officer Corporate Liaison, Stanford IEEE Chapter. Organized regular Tech Talk

Series for Graduate and Undergraduate Students in Electrical Engineering and Computer

Science at Stanford University. Organized I don t know to CEO an Entrepreneurship

conference at Stanford University with leading founders and CEOs from Silicon Valley.

Stanford India Association Core Group Member.

Mentor for Research Group on Search Engines and Information Retrieval

Computer Science Department, SVCE, Anna University

Class Representative - Computer Science Department, SVCE, Anna University

Organizing Committee, Interrupt 03 National level Technical Symposium at SVCE,

Anna University.

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