My name is Maria Christoforaki and (as of 2013-2014) I am a fifth year doctoral student in the Computer Science and Engineering Department of the Polytechnic School of Engineering of New York University.

I am working with Professor Torsten Suel and my research focus is in the areas of Web Search, Information Retrieval, and Data Mining. In particular, I am interested in studying and applying techniques of these areas in managing and analyzing large scale datasets.

Before coming to NY I lived in Greece, where I received my Diploma from the Computer Engineering and Informatics Department of the University of Patras in 2009. My Diploma thesis advisors were Dr Ioannis Chatzigiannakis and Professor Paul Spirakis.

E-mail:

christom (at) cis.poly.edu

mchristoforaki (at) gmail

Phone:

Office: +1 718 260 3765

Mobile: +1 917 445 1582

Office

10.053 M

US Mail:

CSE Department:

NYU, Polytechnic School of Engineering

2 Metrotech Center

Brooklyn, NY 11201

My research interests lie in the areas of Web Search, Information Retrieval, and Data Mining.

Publications

"STEP: A Scalable Testing and Evaluation Platform"
M. Christoforaki and P. G. Ipeirotis
HCOMP 2014

"Estimating Pairwise Distances in Large Graphs"
M. Christoforaki and T. Suel
BigData 2014

"Mining Videos from the Web for Electronic Textbooks"
R. Agrawal, M. Christoforaki, S. Gollapudi, A. Kannan, K. Kenthapadi, and A. Swaminathan
ICFCA 2014

"Searching Social Updates for Topic-centric Entities"
M. Christoforaki, I. Erunse, and C. Yu
VLDS 2011

"Text vs. Space: Efficient Geo-Search Query Processing"
M. Christoforaki, J. He, C. Dimopoulos, A. Markowetz, and T. Suel
CIKM 2011

Polytechnic Institute of NYU

• PhD candidate in Computer Science - 2014 (expected)

• MSc in Computer Science - 2011

University of Patras

• Diploma in Computer Engineering and Informatics - 2009

Software Engineering Intern @ Google, CA - Summer 2013

At Google, I interned in the NLP Research group and my work focused on contributing to Google's Knowledge Graph(KG) freshness. In particular I worked on automatically extracting fresh information from annotated news articles to be added to KG. During my internship I developed a system composed of an KG update extraction component as well as a machine-learned validation component. The validation component utilized various signals related to the entities associated with the extracted information as well as signals extracted from the texts that triggered the extractions.

Research Intern @ Microsoft Research, CA - Summer 2012

At Microsoft Research, I interned in the Search Labs group and my work focused on automatically augmenting educational textbooks with videos. We proposed techniques for identifying the focus of a section in relationship to other sections in the book in terms of a few indicia, which themselves are unique combinations of concept phrases. We scored the candidate videos for augmenting a textbook section based on concept phrases from that section's indicia present in the auditory tract of the video. Our tests using two corpora of textbooks indicated that our system is able to find useful videos.

Data Analytics Intern @ LinkedIn - Summer 2011

At LinkedIn I worked on the InMaps product which provides a visualization of each member's network. In particular I worked on the community detection algorithm that colors the egonet vertices as well as on the automatic label suggestion of the detected communities.For the implementation I used Java and pig and the final work flow was deployed on the Hadoop cluster of LinekdIn.

Open Lab Summer Student @ CERN - Summer 2007

I participated in a project for a simulation of the BitTorrent protocol and chocking and unchoking algorithms by extending existing network simulator software.This demanded an in depth understanding of the structure and advantages of PlanetSim, the simulator, and the BitTorrent prorocol.

External Stagier @ CERN - Summer 2006

In cooperation with the CMS-experiment group I designed and implemented a web-based application for conferences concerning the CMS-experiment and their candidates, using a multi-tier architecture based on MySQL, Java Servlets, JSP and XML technologies.