Nitin Agarwal is a doctoral candidate in Computer Science and Engineering at Arizona State University. His primary interest lies in knowledge extraction in Social media especially Blogosphere. This includes studying, developing computational models for phenomena like influence, trust, familiar strangers in Blogosphere, blog clustering via leveraging collective wisdom, and evaluation of such models. He studies and researches in clustering high dimensional data with its applications ranging from recommender systems to web categorization. He has proposed a novel subspace clustering based framework for research paper recommender system. This system is geared towards helping researchers from the same lab who often spend considerable amount of time searching for published articles relevant to their current research. Despite having similar interests, these researchers conduct independent and time consuming searches and find it harder to share the results afterwards or leverage these results. The novel system named as SCuBA augments existing search engines and offers recommendations based on previous searches performed by others in the lab. The subspace clustering framework takes care of the high-dimensional and highly-sparse data in this domain. The system is built, keeping in mind the flickering nature of researchers by focusing on their short term-interests. Avoiding the overhead of maintaining the profiles of researchers tackles the privacy aspect of data mining.

Publications

Journal Articles

  • Nitin Agarwal and Huan Liu. "Blogosphere: Research Issues, Tools, and Applications". SIGKDD Explorations, 10(1), pp 18 - 31, July 2008. [pdf]
  • Lei Tang, Huan Liu, Jianping Zhang, Nitin Agarwal, and John J. Salerno. "Topic Taxonomy Adaptation for Group Profiling". ACM Transactions on Knowledge Discovery from Data, TKDD 1(4), 2008. [pdf]
  • Nitin Agarwal, Huan Liu, and Jianping Zhang. "Blocking Objectional Web Contents by Leveraging Multiple Information Sources". SIGKDD Explorations, 8(1): 17 - 26, June, 2006. [pdf]
  • Nitin Agarwal, Ehtesham U. Haque, Huan Liu and Lance Parsons. "A Subspace Clustering Framework for Research Group Collaboration". International Journal on Information Technology and Web Engineering, 1(1), pp 35 - 58, January - March, 2006. [pdf]

Conference Papers

  • Nitin Agarwal, Huan Liu, John J. Salerno, and Sanjay Sundarajan. "Understanding Group Interaction in Blogosphere: A Case Study", 2nd International Conference on Computational Cultural Dynamics (ICCCD08), September 15-16, 2008. Washington D.C. [pdf]
  • Nitin Agarwal, Magdiel Galan, Huan Liu, and Shankar Subramanya. "Clustering Blogs with Collective Wisdom", 8th International Conference on Web Engineering (ICWE08), July 14-18, 2008. Yorktown Heights, New York. [pdf]
  • Nitin Agarwal and Huan Liu. "A Study of Communities and Influence in Blogosphere", 2nd SIGMOD PhD Innovative Database and Research Doctorate Consortium (IDAR08), June 13 2008. Vancouver, Canada. [pdf]
  • Nitin Agarwal, Huan Liu, Lei Tang, and Philip S. Yu. "Identifying Influential Bloggers in a Community", 1st International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining (WSDM08), pp 207-218, February 11-12, 2008. Stanford, California. [Video] [pdf].
  • Nitin Agarwal, Huan Liu, John J. Salerno, and Philip S. Yu. "Searching for 'Familiar Strangers' on Blogosphere: Problems and Challenges", NSF Symposium on Next Generation Data Mining and Cyber-enabled Discovery and Innovation (NGDM07), October 10-12, 2007. Baltimore, MD. [pdf]
  • Nitin Agarwal, Magdiel Galan, and Yi Chen. "Approximate Structural Matching over Ordered XML Documents", 11th International Database Engineering and Applications Symposium (IDEAS07), pp 54-62, September 6-8, 2007. Banff, Canada. [pdf]
  • Nitin Agarwal, Ehtesham Haque, Huan Liu, Lance Parsons. "Research Paper Recommender System: A Subspace Clustering Approach", 6th International Conference on Web-Age Information Management (WAIM05), pp. 475 - 491, October 11-13, 2005. Hangzhou, China. [pdf]

Tutorials 

  • Nitin Agarwal and Huan Liu. A Tutorial on "Blogosphere: Research Issues, Applications, and Tools", 14th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD08), August 24-27, 2008. Las Vegas, NV. [slides]

Book Chapters

  • Nitin Agarwal and Huan Liu. "Trust in Blogosphere", Encyclopedia of Database Systems, forthcoming. 
  • Nitin Agarwal, Huan Liu, and Jianping Zhang. "A Study of Friendship Networks and Blogosphere", Handbook of Research on Text and Web Mining, Technologies. Editors: Min Song and Yi-fang Brook Wu. Idea Group Inc. 
  • Nitin Agarwal, Huan Liu, John J. Salerno, and Philip S. Yu. "Searching for 'Familiar Strangers' on Blogosphere", Next Generation of Data Mining, Editors: Hillol Kargupta, Jiawei Han, Philip S. Yu, Rajeev Motwani, and Vipin Kumar. Chapman & Hall/CRC Press.
  • K. Selcuk Candan, Jong Wook Kim, Huan Liu, Reshma Suvarna, and Nitin Agarwal. "Spatial Transformations for Identifying Mappings in Hierarchical Media Data", in Multimedia Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery, Editors: Valery A. Petrushin and Latifur Khan, Springer, 2006.

Professional Services

  • He has reviewed several journal and conference papers for AAAI, PAKDD, EC-WEB, WAIM, International Journal on Information Science, CIKM, IJCSA, APWeb, SDM and JCISE.
  • He has also helped in organizing MGE@MSA conference for 3 consecutive years 2004-2006 as a part of voluntary service at Hispanic Research Center.

Awards

  • He has received GPSA Conference Travel Grant in October 2005, September 2008.
  • He has received DGS Conference Travel Grant in October 2005, July 2008.

Grants

  • He was involved in framing an NSF grant proposal about sensor data integration in collaboration with Arizona Department of Environmental Quality (AZDEQ) and Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Arizona State University.
  • He has been involved in projects from NSF at Hispanic Research Center in ASU and has experience in database programming for developing applications to help Hispanic students in applying to US universities.