Contact me

   

   
    email: me@rutumulkar.com
    url: http://www.rutumulkar.com
    blog: http://nlp-stuff.blogspot.com

---

About me

I am a NLP research Scientist working on industry problems related to healthcare information for efficient patient treatment and appropriate billing for services rendered to the patient. 

I am interested in solving problems related to Natural Language Processing. Specifically, I enjoy working with Topic Modeling, Recommender Systems, Information Extraction, Semantics, and Machine Learning. I love languages - both Natural Languages and Programming languages. I speak English, Hindi and Gujarati fluently and bits of Korean and Spanish. I started out as a Computer Engineer and later I got my Masters and Doctorate in Computer Science from University of Southern California (USC).  I was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at University of California, San Diego (UCSD) before I switched over from working on academic to corporate research. 

I was the Chair of NAACL-2010 Workshop titled Formalisms and Methodology for Learning by Reading (FAM-LbR), and later the Chair for IJCAI-2011 Workshop on Learning by Reading and its Applications in Intelligent Question-Answering. 

In the summer of 2010, interned at the Jeopardy Group at  IBM Research (T.J. Watson) Research Center. I was working on answering "how" questions by identifying granularity shifts in textual descriptions.

Recent Activities

2012:

• Received best poster award at HISB 2012
• Presented a tutorial on Biomedical NLP at HISB 2012
• Participated in the i2b2 NLP shared task for discovering temporal relations from clinical discharge summaries
  
• Attended the NLM NLP Workshop on Biomedical Informatics
  
• Presented a talk at the UCSD AI Seminar

2011:

• Chair for IJCAI-2011 workshop on Learning by Reading and Question Answering
• Presented a poster at Machine Reading Phase 3 Kickoff meeting, Seattle
• Presented a talk at Reasoning with Text, 2011 Workshop, at ICT, Los Angeles

2010:

• Summer Intern at IBM, Jeopardy Group, Hawthorne, NY
• Passed Qualifying Examination and Admitted to Candidacy
• Visiting Researcher at IBM, Jeopardy Group, Hawthorne, NY

2009:

• Recipient of the WiSE travel scholarship
• Summer Intern at PriceWaterhouseCoopers (Center for Advanced Research)
• Recipient of the Phi Beta Kappa scholarship for 2009-2010

2007:

• Invited to attend Symposium on Evolution of Semantic Systems, Jena, Germany
• Represented USC at the Grace Hopper Conference, Orlando Florida

2005:

• Selected to attend JHU Summer School on Human Language Technology

Service

Program Committee and Reviewer

• The 5th International Symposium on Semantic Mining in Biomedicine (SMBM), 2012
  
• International Workshop on Machine Reading for Social Media Content Analytics (IMRSMCA'12)
  
• Information Retrieval and Knowledge Discovery in Biomedical Text symposium, at the AAAI 2012 Fall Symposia series.
• International Journal on Semantic Web and Information Systems (IJSWIS), Special Edition on "Web Scale Knowledge Extraction", 2012, Ed. Aditya Kalyanpur, James Fan, Chris Welty
  
• Natural Language Processing in the Web Era, Volume 6.2, December 2012, Ed. Roberto Basili, Bernardo Magnini
  
• Journal on BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making 2012
• Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-2011)
• Webscale Knowledge Extraction co-located with KCAP 2011
• Learning by Reading in the Real World (LERREW 2011) co-located with Conference of the Italian Association for Artificial Intelligence (AI*IA 2011)
• Learning by Reading and its Applications in Intelligent Question-Answering (FAM-LbR/KRAQ 2011), co-located with IJCAI 2011

• Conference on Intelligent Text Processing and Computational Linguistics CICLing 2011

• Association of Computational Linguistics (ACL 2011)

• Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI 2011)

• Student Summit @ Machine Reading Phase 3 Kickoff meeting 2011
• Artificial Intelligence Journal (AIJ 2010)
• Workshop on Formalisms and Methodology for Learning by Reading (FAM-LbR 2010), co-located with NAACL 2010

• USC-ISI Graduate Student Symposium 2007-2009

Organizing

• Workshop on Learning by Reading and its Applications in Intelligent Question-Answering (FAM-LbR/KRAQ 2011), co-located with IJCAI 2011
• Workshop on Formalisms and Methodology for Learning by Reading (FAM-LbR 2010), co-located with NAACL 2010

Session Chair

• Workshop on Formalisms and Methodology for Learning by Reading (FAM-LbR 2010), co-located with NAACL 2010

Mentoring

• Mentor at Mentornet (2011 - Present)

Advising

• Emily Silgard, Summer Intern at UCSD (with Wendy Chapman)
• Wei Wei, Ph.D.Student at UCSD (with Wendy Chapman)

Teaching

Co-Instructor: CSCI 544 (Spring 2009)

In Spring 2009 I taught the Natural Language Processing course at USC with Dr. Eduard Hovy and Dr. Jerry Hobbs. I taught for most of March. My duties included preparation of lecture slides on parsing and the final assignment for my section which accounted for 25% of the final grade. I also programmed the software used for Assignment 2.

Teaching Assistant: CSCI 544 (Spring 2007)

In Spring 2007 I was a teaching assistant for the Natural Language Processing course at USC. My duties included grading HW assignments and programming the software for Assignment 3.