JOIN USIndian student en route to global brainstorming summit
Karthik Ramachandra, a doctoral student in Computer Science at IIT Bombay, is joining 26 students from 19 universities at the Yahoo! headquarters in Sunnyvale, California for the Key Scientific Challenges Graduate Student Summit. They will all present their work, discuss research trends and jointly develop revolutionary approaches to fundamental problems with academics, scientists and top minds in the industry.
The milestone that is making this possible for Karthik, who is currently researching the topic ‘Holistic Optimization of Database Applications’ under the guidance of Prof S Sudarshan at IIT, Bombay, is Yahoo!’s 2011 Key Scientific Program that encourages graduate students globally to collaborate with the company and help invent the future of the Internet.
Rajeev Rastogi, VP and Head of Yahoo! Labs, Bangalore, explains that the 2011 contest is the third annual installment of the programme which Yahoo has set up “with a view to support research in new scientific areas that will deliver next generation Internet technology to users.”
Accordingly, the winners were selected on the basis of their research proposals on diverse scientific issues, ranging from the effects of online advertising to mining personally relevant information on the web.
Rastogi says, “The competition was keen as Yahoo received an overwhelming number of outstanding applications.” Karthik won the award for Data Management in the Web Information Management section as did three others: Neil Conway, UC Berkeley; Wenyuan Yu, University of Edinburgh and Emad Soroush, University of Washington. Another Karthik from Cornell won for Search Experiences along with Kira Radinsky from the Israel Institute of Technology.
India boasts of another candidate this year: Achintya Kundu, India Institute of Science for Machine Learning.
Twenty seven student researchers world wide were selected in all as recipients of the 2011 Award. They will all receive USD 5,000 each as unrestricted research seed funding grant for their research, exclusive access to select Yahoo! datasets and an opportunity to work with senior internet scientists at Yahoo! Labs to advance their research over the next year. “I’m delighted to win the award and am looking forward to the summit,” says Karthik, barely containing his excitement.
His award-winning KSC submission researched Traditional Query Optimization and Compiler Optimization. Karthik says that finding a technique that guarantees the global optimal execution requires a holistic viewpoint of the application as a single entity. He adds,“Such holistic approaches exploit knowledge about application source code and interaction pattern between the application and database.”