Amherst, Massachusetts, USA

people.cs.umass.edu/~akobren

akobren (at) cs (dot) umass (dot) edu

resume (PDF)

           

I'm a Ph.D. student at UMass Amherst working in the Information Extraction and Synthesis Laboratory with Professor Andrew McCallum. Previously, I received a B.S. in Computer Science from Tufts University and worked as a researcher at MIT Lincoln Laboratory building intelligent decision support systems for US intelligence analysts. I spent the summer of 2014 at Google MTV training models of worker-task interaction that I used to optimize a new crowdsourcing platform. I spent the summer of 2016 at Google NYC building deep networks to predict characteristics of the locations in Google Maps.

Research Interests

I am primarily interested in developing scalable machine learning algorithms that are theoretically motivated. Currently I'm working on algorithms for data integration--or combining multiple, heterogeneous sources of data into a single, consistent knowledge base. As such, I've focused on methods for information extraction, entity resolution, clustering and intelligently incorporating human contributions with automated inferences. I'm also broadly interested in interactive machine learning, linear programming and crowdsourcing.

Researcher.cc

I am also the chief designer and maintainer of ReSearcher.cc, a database of scientific affiliations and collaborations and conference management. Our backend integration engine dynamically produces ReSearcher's content by synthesizing multiple sources of data including edits from users. ReSearcher has been used by ICCV, ECCV, CVPR and MICCAI to help identify conflicts of interest in peer review and automatically produce matchings of papers to reviewers.

Preprints

• An Online Hierarchical Algorithm for Extreme Clustering.
  Kobren, A*., Monath, N.*, Krishnamurthy, A., McCallum, A. [bibtex] (*Equal Contribution)
  To appear in Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, KDD 2017.

Publications

• Domain Specific Knowledge Base Construction via Crowdsourcing. Kobren, A., Logan, T., Sampangi, S., McCallum, A.NIPS '14 Workshop on Automated Knowledge Base Construction (AKBC). Montreal, Canada. December 2013. (Outstanding Paper Award) [bibtex]
• Getting More for Less: Optimized Crowdsourcing with Dynamic Tasks and Goals. Kobren, A., Tan, C.H., Ipeirotis, P., Gabrilovich, E.The International Conference on the World Wide Web (WWW). Florence, Italy. May 2015. [bibtex]
• Domain Specific Knowledge Base Construction via Crowdsourcing. Kobren, A., Logan, T., Sampangi, S., McCallum, A.NIPS '14 Workshop on Automated Knowledge Base Construction (AKBC). Montreal, Canada. December 2013. (Outstanding Paper Award) [bibtex]
• Universal Schema for Slot Filling and Cold Start: UMass IESL at TACKBP 2013. Singh, S., Yao, L., Belanger, D., Kobren, A., Anzaroot, S., Wick, M., Passos, A., Pandya, H., Choi, J., Martin, B., and McCallum, A. Text Analysis Conference (Knowledge Base Population Track) '13 Workshop (TAC KBP). Gaithersburg, Maryland, USA. November 2013. [bibtex]
• Assessing Confidence of Knowledge Base Content With an Experimental Study in Entity Resolution. Wick, M.L., Singh, S., Kobren, A. and McCallum, A. CIKM '13 Workshop on Automated Knowledge Base Construction (AKBC). San Francisco, California, USA. October 2013. [bibtex]
• Large-scale Author Coreference via Hierarchical Entity Representations. Wick, M.L., Kobren, A. and McCallum, A. ICML '13 Workshop on Peer Reviewing and Publishing Models (PEER). Atlanta, Georgia, USA. June 2013. [bibtex]
• Probabilistic Reasoning about Human Edits in Information Integration. Wick, M.L., Kobren, A. and McCallum, A. ICML '13 Workshop on Machine Learning Meets Crowdsourcing. Atlanta, Georgia, USA. June 2013. [bibtex]

Other Fun Stuff

In my spare time, I enjoy cooking (especially ethnic foods that involve uncommon spices), learning for free, climbing, playing soccer and other sports, composing/playing music, snowboarding, playing German-style board games, traveling the world, listening to NPR (e.g. The Moth Radio Hour and wNYC's RadioLab), eating gummy candy, and learning about philosophy, religion, and nutrition.

In a previous life, I co-found a start-up and was a junior olympic Tae Kwon Do champ.

My favorite book is Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.