Harshit Surana's personal website

surana [dot] h [at] gmail [dot] com

Resume for Harshit Surana

Summary

Completed undergraduate studies in July 07. Broad experience in software design and development during undergraduate years. Designed and developed a business analysis tool for a major multinational chemicals company. Also represented the university in an international programming contest(ACM ICPC 06 South Asian Finals). Some of my independent projects also won national acclaim(Microsoft Projects 05 and 06).

Presently working in an academic research center and involved with research in Natural Language Processing and Artificial Intelligence. Some of my research has been published in reputed international conferences(IJCNLP 08, RANLP 07) and workshops(ACL 07, ACM SIGIR 07).

Educational Background

Completed Bachelor of Technology (B. Tech) in Computer Science and Engineering from Vellore Institute of Technology, India in July. Aug 03 - Jul 07. CGPA – 8.26/10

Was amongst the top 2% in IIT JEE in which over 180,000 (a rank of 3696 in IIT Screening 03) engineering aspirants appear.

Was ranked 5543 in AIEEE, in which over 380,000 engineering aspirants appear. Was amongst top 1.5% of the candidates.

General Graduate Record Examination (GRE) - 1470/1600

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Work Experience

Research Scientist (previously Intern) at Language Technologies Research Center, IIIT Hyderabad
Working on several research projects and also involved with new research initiatives. Mentored several undergraduate students during their projects. Also involved with organising an IJCNLP 08 workshop.
Duration: December 06 – Present

Freelance Developer for ICI Paints India Ltd.
Developed a business analysis and management tool. Negotiated system requirements from various stakeholders including Technicians, Dealers and Sales Managers. Also coordinated with other team members.
Duration: December, 05 – June, 06

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Research Projects

Presently working on Transliteration, Spelling Variations and User Interface for Information Retrieval in Indian Languages. The focus of the project is to overcome various bottlenecks posed in computation and information retrieval for Indian Languages.
Duration: January 07– Ongoing

Developed an annotation Interface and various APIs during summer internship at LTRC. The interface has been adopted as the chief annotation interface at LTRC. The APIs developed are being used for other projects. The system has also been used in other Research Centers in India, including IIT Bombay and University of Hyderabad.
Duration: December 05 – June, 06

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Selected Publications

This is a selective list of more significant publications. To see the full list and the citation text visit Publications page .

A More Discerning and Adaptable Multilingual Transliteration Mechanism for Indian Languages
[Machine Transliteration, Speech Processing]
H Surana and A K Singh
The Third International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (IJCNLP)
Hyderabad, India. 2008 [PDF]

More Accurate Fuzzy Text Search for Languages Using Abugida Scripts
[Information Retrieval, Computational Phonlogy]
A K Singh, H Surana and K Gali
ACM SIGIR Workshop on Improving Web Retrieval for non-English queries
SIGIR, Amsterdam, Netherlands. 2007 [PDF, PPT]

Disambiguating Tense, Aspect and Modality Markers for Correcting Machine Translation Errors
[Machine Translation, Machine Learning]
A K Singh, S Husain, H Surana, J Gorla, C Guggilla and D M Sharma
Conference on Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing (RANLP)
Borovets, Bulgaria. 2007 [PDF]

Using a Single Framework for Computational Modeling of Linguistic Similarity for Solving Many NLP Problems
[Natural Language Processing]
A K Singh and H Surana
Eurolan Doctoral Consortium
Iasi, Romania. 2007

Can Corpus Based Measures be Used for Comparative Study of Languages?
[Information Theory, Language, Linguistics]
A K Singh and H Surana
Ninth Meeting of ACL Special Interest Group on Computational Phonology and Morphology
ACL, Prague, Czech Republic. 2007 [PDF, PPT]

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Development Projects

Developed PACE (Profitability Actioned by Control and Efficiency). PACE is a Business Analysis and Body Shop Mgmt. Tool for ICI Paints, India Ltd. Presently in Beta Test in select bodyshops, PACE would be used by bodyshops across country & handle business in 10’s of millions.
Team Size: 2
Duration: December, 05 – June, 06

Developed Intra-Site Search Engine IBot. IBot employed intelligent page segmentation, template classes, human annotation and machine indexing to provide a better alternative. IBot was selected in the top 20 among thousands of projects by Microsoft and was showcased in Microsoft Academic Projects Expo 06 (Parallel event with Imagine Cup 06 Nationals).
Team Size: 4
Duration: January, 06 – April, 06

Developed Speech Enabled Radio Taxi Management. The project was selected by Microsoft to be presented in the Microsoft National Expo. It was judged as the 2nd Best among the projects presented at the Pune Expo.
Team Size: 3
Duration: November, 04 – May, 05

Conceived and developed an innovative beginner friendly Java language editor Easy Java. Easy Java has become a popular software, being used by Java learners inside the university campus and web users alike. Easy Java has been a ‘popular’ download at a stretch of 25 weeks on major sites like www.download.com and www.zdnet.com.
Team Size: 2
Duration: August – October, 04

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Awards and Achievments

Awarded Asian Nagao Fund Award to attend International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing at Hyderabad, 08.

Selected for support by Association of Computational Linguistics (ACL) to attend the 45th meeting at Prague, 07.

Projects selected by Microsoft to be showcased in the Microsoft Projects (05 and 06), a parallel event with Imagine Cup nationals. Roughly 20 projects were selected among thousands of candidates for both years.

Represented the university in ACM – International Collegiate Programming Contest 06 (ICPC). The team was selected for Kanpur/Kolkata (South Asian) regional-finals among teams from India, China, Singapore & Korea.

Received ‘Distinction’ from University of New South Wales International competition for schools in years 97, 98 in categories Math & Science and in 01 for Math & Computer Science.

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Technical Skills

Operating Systems - DOS, Windows, UNIX, LINUX

Programming - C/C++, Java, Shell scripting, VB.NET, CGI/PERL

GUI Tools - Visual Basic 6 , VB.NET, Java Swing

Multimedia Tools - Macromedia Flash, Macromedia Fireworks

Database - SQL Server 2000 and mySQL

Web Technologies - ASP.NET, PHP, HTML, Javascript, Flash and Actionscript 1.0

Tools/ Packages Used - WEKA, OpenNLP, GATE

Also Familiar With - Google AJAX Toolkit, Windows Embedded Development

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Activities / Extracurricular

Program comittee and organization for IJCNLP 08 Workshop on NLP for Less Privileged Languages.

Organization for IJCNLP 08 Workshop and Shared Task on NER for South and South East Asian Languages.

Member of the Organizing committee of Phreak 05, a university technical fest. Also gave a talk titled ‘The Corporate Ladder’ in the same.

Member of the Organizing committee of Swatantra 05 a national symposium and festival focusing on free and open source software. The fest had distinguished speakers including Richard M Stallman. Also conceptualized & conducted the Corewars tournament in the same.

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Notable Experience

Love to travel, meet new people and explore cultures. Have traveled across 9 countries in Europe, Middle East and South East Asia.

Worked as a web developer in school years (grade 7–9), which included making sites/interfaces for local companies and an American client. Had extensively worked on Macromedia Flash and visual webpage editors to create streamlined, effective marketing based sites.

Developed various applications, freebies and simulations using Flash and its inbuilt language Actionscript, during grade 9 and 10. These included Ball Simulator, Harmonic Color Finder and lab instrument simulations.

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