Data Mining

The delineation between types of data is often regarded as unstructured, structured, and semi-structured with the latter being a combination of unstructured and structured data. Data mining contains methods to be used for predictive analysis on structured data, such as classification and clustering. There is a plethora of numerical data such as financial and genetic data, to name just a few.  I'm interested in ways to improve the interpretation of these models especially with neural networks, which is regarded for the most part as a black box. 

Information Extraction

Information extraction is primarily concerned with methods to extract meaningful data from text.  There are many sub-problems in this space with overlap in natural language processing. Some problems involve Named Entity Recognition and Word Sense Disambiguation. I'm interested in automatically identifying entities from text using various types of data  and statistical methods. 

Natural Language Processing

Natural Language Processing is regarded as a sub-field in artificial intelligence pertaining to the interaction between humans and the computer in the form of natural language. My interest is in conversational user interfaces using custom and open source approaches. 

Text Mining

Text mining is a sub-field within data mining, which also incorporates information extraction and natural language processing.  One of the key differences between text mining and data mining pertains to the initial data representation. With text mining the data is typically unstructured and has to be put into a numerical representation for processing. My interest is in text categorization and text summarization, as well as question answer systems.

Computer Science Education

Computer science is an exciting and challenging field. I'm interested in exploring ways to improve the delivery of computing especially to undergraduate students.  Some approaches incorporate project-based and active-learning.  

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I'm interested in working with computer science students in any of the aforementioned research areas. Please reach out to me and let me know what area(s) you are interested in pursuing.  Note that at LTU, we do have a limited about of Graduate Research Student Assistantships for graduate students, as well.