1. Kunal Punera
870 E El Camino Real, Apt 119,
Mountain View, CA 94040, USA
1-512-659-4925
kpu{rest of lastname} @ yahoo {hyphen} inc {dot} com
http://www.lans.ece.utexas.edu/~kunal
Last updated: Sep 2008
Seeking a full time position with a research lab working on Web/Data Mining, Information
Objective Retrieval, and Machine Learning.
Research Interests Web Data Analysis, Data Mining, Machine Learning, Information Retrieval
Education Dept. of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Texas at Austin.
• Ph.D., Computer Engineering (Dec 2004 – Aug 2007)
• Master of Science, Computer Engineering (Aug 2002 - Dec 2004),
Major GPA: 4.0 Overall GPA: 3.9
Relevant Courses: Data Mining, Advanced Data Mining, Machine Learning, Web Mining,
Web Information Retrieval, Introduction to Neural Networks, Probability and Stochastic
Processes I, Information Theory, Bioinformatics, Engineering Programming Languages,
Verification and Validation of Software Systems
Sardar Patel College of Engineering, University of Mumbai (Bombay).
• Bachelor of Engineering, Computer Engineering, (Aug 1997 - May 2001)
Major GPA: 3.9 Overall GPA: 3.8
Relevant Courses: Artificial Intelligence, Database Systems, Computer Networks, Object
Oriented Programming, Computer Methodology and Algorithms, Software Engineering,
Structured Systems Analysis and Design
Professional Conference Program Committee
Activity • WWW 2009: 18th International World Wide Web Conference
• SDM 2009: SIAM International Conference on Data Mining
• ICDM 2008: IEEE International Conference on Data Mining
• WWW 2008: 17th International World Wide Web Conference
• WSDM 2008: 1st ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining
• KDD 2007: 13th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge
Discovery and Data Mining
Reviewer: Conferences
• ICDE 2008: IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering
• KDD 2005: ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery
and Data Mining
• WWW 2006/03: International World Wide Web Conference
• AAAI 2005: AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence
• MCS 2005/04: International Workshop on Multi-classifier Systems
• SDM 2004: SIAM International Conference on Data Mining
• ICDM 2003: IEEE International Conference on Data Mining
Reviewer: Journals
• ACM Transaction on the Web
• World Wide Web Journal
• IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering
• ACM Transactions on Information Systems
• Journal of Web Intelligence and Agent Systems
Publications

2. Chapters:
with Joydeep Ghosh, Soft Consensus Clustering, in Advances in Fuzzy Clustering and its
Applications, J. Oliveira and W. Pedrycz, (eds), Wiley, March 2007
Journal papers:
with Joydeep Ghosh, Consensus Based Ensembles of Soft Clusterings, Journal of
Applied Artificial Intelligence, Volume 22, Numbers 7-8, August2008
with Aris Anagnostopoulos and Andrei Broder, Effective and Efficient Classification via
a Search Engine Model, Journal of Knowledge and Information Systems, Volume 16,
Issue 2, Springer-Verlag New York, September 2007
with Soumen Chakrabarti, Mukul Joshi, and David Pennock, The structure of broad
topics on the Web, Complexity Digest, Vol 14, April 2002
with Soumen Chakrabarti, R. Jaju, and Mukul Joshi, Analyzing fine-grained hypertext
features for enhanced crawling and topic distillation, IEEE Data Engineering, Vol. 25,
No. 1, March 2002
Conference papers:
with Deepayan Chakrabarti and Ravi Kumar, Generating Succinct Titles for Web Pages,
accepted at 12th ACM International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining
(KDD), Aug 2008
with Joydeep Ghosh, Enhanced Hierarchical Classification via Isotonic Smoothing, 17th
International World Wide Web Conference (WWW), April 2008
with Deepayan Chakrabarti and Ravi Kumar, A Graph-theoretic Approach to Webpage
Segmentation, 17th International World Wide Web Conference (WWW), April 2008
with Deepayan Chakrabarti and Ravi Kumar, Page-Level Template Detection via
Isotonic Smoothing, 16th International World Wide Web Conference (WWW), May 2007
with Suju Rajan and Joydeep Ghosh, Automatic Construction of N-ary Tree based
Taxonomies, 6th IEEE International Conference on Data Mining (ICDM), Dec 2006
with Aris Anagnostopoulos and Andrei Broder, Effective and Efficient Classification via
a Search Engine Model, 15th ACM Conference on Information and Knowledge
Management (CIKM), Nov 2006
with Ravi Kumar and Andrew Tomkins, Hierarchical Topic Segmentation of Websites,
12th ACM International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD),
Aug 2006
with Joydeep Ghosh, CLUMP: a Scalable and Robust Framework for Structure
Discovery, 5th IEEE International Conference on Data Mining (ICDM), Nov 2005
with Suju Rajan and Joydeep Ghosh, A Maximum Likelihood Framework for
Integrating Taxonomies, 25th AAAI Conference, on Artificial Intelligence July 2005
with David Gibson and Andrew Tomkins, The Volume and Evolution of Web Page
Templates, 14th International World Wide Web Conference (WWW), May 2005
with Suju Rajan and Joydeep Ghosh, Automatically Learning Document Taxonomies
for Hierarchical Classification, 14th International World Wide Web Conference (WWW),
May 2005

3. with Soumen Chakrabarti and Mallela Subramanyam, Accelerated Focused Crawling
through Online Relevance Feedback, 11th International World Wide Web Conference
(WWW), May 2002
with Soumen Chakrabarti, Mukul Joshi, and David Pennock, The Structure of Broad
Topics on the Web, 11th International World Wide Web Conference (WWW), May 2002
Patents:
Torsten Suel, Kunal Punera, Ravi Kumar, Sergei Vassilvitskii, System and Method for
Aggregating a List of Top Ranked Objects from Combination Attribute Lists Using
an Early Termination Algorithm, filed Sep 2008
Deepayan Chakrabarti, Ravi Kumar, Kunal Punera, Generating Succinct Titles for Web
URLs, filed Aug 2008
Kunal Punera, Suju Rajan, Method and Apparatus for Utilizing Social Network
Information for Showing Reviews, filed May 2008
Kunal Punera, A Method and System for Determining if a Computer User is Human,
filed Mar 2008
Ravi Kumar, Deepayan Chakrabarti, Kunal Punera, Method for Segmenting Web Pages,
filed Mar 2008
Deepayan Chakrabarti, Ravi Kumar, Kunal Punera, System and Method for Smoothing
Hierarchical Data using Isotonic Regression, filed May 2007
Deepayan Chakrabarti, Ravi Kumar, Kunal Punera, A Method and System for Detecting
Templates in a Web Page, filed May 2007
Kunal Punera, Ravi Kumar, Andrew Tomkins, System and Method for Hierarchical
Segmentation of Websites by Topic, filed Aug 2006
University Research
Experience Intelligent Data Exploration and Analysis Lab (with Dr. Joydeep Ghosh)
August 2002 - to date http://www.ideal.ece.utexas.edu
Dept. of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Texas-Austin
I am currently working in Dr. Joydeep Ghosh's research group on automatic
construction, integration, and other analysis for data organized as hierarchical taxonomies.
In previous semesters I have investigated combining multiple clustering results to aid
distributed and robust data mining, web usage mining for e-commerce websites, and
clustering of streaming data.
Aug 2003 – Jan 2004 School of Information Science (with Dr. Don Turnbull)
http://www.ischool.utexas.edu/~donturn/
University of Texas-Austin
My research concentrated on cognitive models of user behavior on the Web. This was a
continuation of my work with Dr. Ghosh on clustering customers on e-commerce websites.
We were interested in being able to quantify, and eventually classify patterns of user
interaction with websites.
July 2001 - June 2002 Lab for Intelligent Internet Research (with Dr. Soumen Chakrabarti)
http://www.cse.iitb.ac.in/laiir/
Indian Institute of Technology-Bombay
I worked with Dr. Soumen Chakrabarti on Hypertext Information Retrieval and Mining.
My work primarily involved adapting machine learning techniques for better classification
of hypertext in order to aid focused web crawlers.
Jan 2001 - May 2002 Part Whole Relations (with Dr. R. K. Joshi)
http://www.cse.iitb.ac.in/~rkj/

4. Indian Institute of Technology-Bombay
I worked with Dr. Rushikesh Joshi on the Taxonomy of Meronymic (Part-Whole)
relations. The product of the research is an improved taxonomy, which includes additional
constraints introduced by us.
Industry Research
Experience Yahoo! Research
August 2005 - to date http://www.research.yahoo.com
Dept. of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Texas-Austin
For the last couple of years, Yahoo! Research has been funding my work at UT-Austin,
and I have been visiting and interning with them. My research involves development of
smoothing and segmentation algorithms for tree structured data and applying them to
problems in webpage and website segmentation as well as page-level template (noise)
detection. I have also been working on improving the speed and accuracy of query
processing by exploiting correlations between query terms.
IBM Almaden Research Center
June 2004 – Aug 2004 http://www.almaden.ibm.com/
June 2005 – Aug 2005 University of Texas-Austin
I interned for two summers with the WebFountain group which was concerned with
creating a web search engine that extracted and utilized deep semantic information about
entities in webpages. My research involved removal of noise due to webpage templates and
fast and accurate webpage classification via the search engine model.
Verity Inc., (now acquired by Autonomy Inc.)
June 2003 - Aug 2003 http://www.verity.com
I worked with the Development and Emerging Technologies divisions to identify and
test the efficacy of a new query independent score for Intranet documents. The result of this
work was identification of the features and their weights which comprise the query
independent score. In the course of my work I set up a Relevance Measurement Framework
which was used to compare the Verity search engine with other such products or with
different settings of parameters. Other by-products of this work included a way to
automatically generate relevance judgments.
Work Experience ECE Department, The University of Texas at Austin, http://www.ece.utexas.edu/
Jan 2004 – May 2005 Teaching Assistant for Data Mining
This course teaches data mining from a machine learning perspective. I was in charge of
helping the students with the assignments and various tools like WEKA and SAS. Apart
from this I had regular duties like grading the assignment, presentations, and projects.
ECE Department, The University of Texas at Austin, http://www.ece.utexas.edu/
Aug 2002 – May 2003 Teaching Assistant for Electronic Circuits I
My responsibilities included teaching and guiding lab sessions of the Electronic Circuits
I class. We used tools such as PSPICE and LabView to perform the measurement
experiments. I also conducted examinations and graded the lab assignments.
Acquisnet Software, Bombay, http://www.acquisi.com/
Jan 2000 - June 2001 Project Designer
My work involved the complete development of web sites, from acquiring user
requirements to designing the databases and overseeing the programming and deployment.
In my capacity as a project designer I designed and implemented www.jyotiindia.com,
www.fortpointautomotive.com and the online auction and shopping modules of
www.orangefrog.com, a horizontal portal. I used technologies such as Java,
ASP, and Javascript during this stint.
Computer Skills Programming Languages: C, C++, Java, Perl, Visual Basic, ASP, Javascript
DBMS: IBM DB2, MS Access, Berkeley DB
Tools and Libraries: WEKA, MATLAB, SNNS, UML
Operating Systems: Linux /Unix, Windows (95-XP), and DOS
Markup Languages: HTML, XML, Latex
Non-Technical Skills Organizational and leadership skills: I was the ‘Head Boy’ of Naval Public School (high
school) in (96’-97’). I captained the soccer team in both my high school and

5. undergraduate institution. I also organized various technical events in SPACE, our inter-
college festival. I honed my interpersonal skills and ability to work in a team at
Acquisnet Software and later in Intelligent Internet research group at I.I.T.-Bombay.
Extra-Curricular: I captained my undergraduate college’s soccer team. I also represented
my college in badminton and table tennis. I learnt to play the guitar for many years.
Accomplishments Merit Scholarship Award, Ministry of Human Resources, Govt. of India, 1997
'Dhirubhai Ambani Foundation' scholarship (1997-2001) for being placed 9th in the All
India Senior School Certificate Examination (AISSCE) in the state of Maharashtra.
Merit certificate awarded by CBSE for being placed in the top 0.1% of all scoring
students (approx. 2,500,000) from all over India in the AISSCE.
'Indian Naval Benevolent Association' scholarship (1997,1998,1999,2000).
'Best Senior Student of the year 1995-1996 in Naval Public School. Also elected 'Head
Boy' in the academic year 1996-1997.
Merit Certificate awarded by 'All Goa Mathematics Teachers Association' for being placed
in the 4th in the state level Math Competitive Test in year 1993.
Employability Status: O-1 visa (Yahoo!).
References: Available on request