A. C. Surendran  Senior Applied Researcher, Microsoft adCenter Labs, previously at Microsoft Research  One Microsoft Way, Redmond WA 98052,  Phone: (425) 707-5018, Fax: (425) 936-7329, ACSUREN at-MICROSOFT dot com

About Me

I am currently a member of Microsoft adCenter Labs, the research arm of Microsoft adCenter. Our role is to advance the state-of-the-art in digital advertising technologies through  research, breakthrough innovation, rapid prototyping, and large-scale system integration.

Till July 2006 I was a part of "Knowledge Tools Research" group at Microsoft Research. We used machine learning to demystify complex data sets encountered by people on a daily basis e.g. email, news, etc. Before joining MSR in November 2002, I was at Bell Labs working on speech and speaker recognition in the the now defunct Multimedia Communications Research Laboratory. I got my Ph.D. from Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. There, I worked at the Center for Advanced Information Processing (CAIP). I got my bachelor's degree from the Indian Institute of Technology, Roorkee (formerly University of Roorkee).

• Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Speech, Language and Audio Processing (2004-2007)
• Co-chair for the First International Workshop on Data Mining and Audience Intelligence for Advertisement (ADKDD'07) in conjunction with KDD '07.
• PC member for TROA 2008 WWW Workshop on Targeting and Ranking for Online Advertising, Beijing, China, Apr 2008.
• PC member for SIGIR Workshop on Information Retrieval for Advertising (IRA 2008), Singapore, July 2008.
• Treasurer for KDD 2008, Las Vegas, NV - the conference will be held 24-27th Aug 2008, in Las Vegas, USA.
• Co-chair for ADKDD '08 - The 2nd KDD Workshop on Data Mining and Audience Intelligence for Advertising - Workshop is on Aug 24th 2008, in Las Vegas, USA
• Senior PC member IUI 2009 - International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces, Sanibel Island, FL, Feb 2009.
• PC Member, SDM09 - Ninth SIAM International Conference on Data Mining, Sparks, NV, Apr 2009.
• PC Member, WWW 2009, Eighteenth International World Wide Web Conference, Internet Monetization Track, Madrid, Apr 2009.

Research Interests:

The overarching theme of my research is to solve problems involving large complex data using machine learning and data mining, to make people more productive, and their lives a bit easier.

• Machine learning algorithms for solving problems in online advertisement & monetization
• Social intelligence
• Text mining & analysis: text categorization, clustering, keyword extraction, evolving and growing topic models, applications such as email mining & tagging
• SDPs and other optimization problems
• Speech & speaker recognition

Selected Publications:

Advertising

• "Learning from Multi-topic Web Documents for Contextual Advertisement", Yi Zhang, A. C. Surendran, John C. Platt & Mukund Narasimhan, accepted to KDD 2008, Las Vegas, Aug 2008. - Best Application Paper Award Runner-up
• "Re-wiring the Ad Ecosystem", Tarek Najm, A. C. Surendran, Keynote at IRA 2008, SIGIR Workshop on Information Retrieval for Advertising, Singapore, July 2008.
• "Data Mining and Audience Intelligence for Advertising", Ying Li, A. C. Surendran and Dou Shen, SIGKDD Explorations, Vol. 9, Issue 2, pp. 96-99, December 2007.

Semidefinite Programming:

• "Fast Low-rank Semidefinite Programming for Embedding and Clustering", Brian Kulis, A. C. Surendran and John C. Platt, AISTATS 2007, Puerto Rico, March 2007.

Boosting:

• "A Generative-Discriminative Framework Using Ensemble Methods for Text Dependent Speaker Verification", A. Subramanya, Z. Zhang, Arun C. Surendran and others, ICASSSP 2007, Hawaii, April 2007.

Text Mining, Information Organization and Retrieval:

• "Incremental Aspect Models for Mining Document Streams", Arun C. Surendran and Suvrit Sra, ECML/PKDD 2006, Berlin, Germany, Sep 2006.
• SWISH: Semantic Analysis of Window Titles and Switching History", Nuria Oliver, Greg Smith, Chintan Thakkar and Arun C. Surendran, Proceedings of Int. Conf. on Intelligent User Interfaces (IUI'06). Sydney. Australia. Jan 2006.
• Automatic Discovery of Personal Topics To Organize Email" Arun C. Surendran, John C. Platt and Erin Renshaw, Conference on Email and Anti-Spam, 21-22 July at Stanford University, 2005.

Acoustic Echo Suppression:

• "Double-talk Detection using Real-time Recurrent Learning", with M. Iqbal, and others, to be presented to the International Workshop on Acoustic Echo and Noise Control IWAENC '06, Paris, France, September 2006
• "Regression-Based Residual Acoustic Echo Suppression", Amit S. Chhetri, Arun C. Surendran, Jack W. Stokes and John C. Platt, International Workshop on Acoustic Echo and Noise Control IWAENC '05, Eindhoven, Netherlands, September 2005.  Listen to some sample results here.

Speech Detection:

• "Logistic Discriminative Speech Detectors Using Posterior SNR", Arun C. Surendran, S. Sukittanon and J. C. Platt,  ICASSP-2004, Montreal, Canada, May 2004.
• "Convolutional Networks for Speech Detection", S. Sukittanon, Arun C. Surendran, J. C. Platt and Chris J. C. Burges, Interspeech 2004, Korea, October 2004.

Bayesian Learning for speech recognition:

• “Transformation Based Bayesian Prediction for Adaptation of HMMs”, A. C. Surendran and C.-H. Lee,  Speech Communication (34), pp. 159-174, April 2001.

• “Structural Bayesian Predictive Adaptation of HMMs”, O. Siohan and A. C. Surendran, Workshop on Adaptation, Sophia-Antipolis, France, August 2001

•  “Hierarchical Bayes Approach to Adapting Delta- and Delta-Delta Cepstra”, A. C. Surendran, ICASSP ’00, pp. 973-976, Istanbul, Turkey, June 2000.

Speaker Verification:

• “Speaker Authentication for Business and National Security”, Invited talk at the IEEE Conference on Technologies for Homeland Security, Boston, MA, April 2002.

• “Sequential Decisions for Faster and More Flexible Verification”, A. C. Surendran, EUROSPEECH ’01, pp. 763-766, Aalborg, Denmark, September 2001.

• “A Priori Threshold Selection Mechanism for Fixed Vocabulary Speaker Verification Systems”, A. C. Surendran and C.-H. Lee, ICSLP ’00, Beijing, China, September 2000.

• “Background Model Design for Flexible and Portable Speaker Verification Systems”, O. Siohan, C.-H. Lee, A. C. Surendran and Q. Li, ICASSP '99, pp. 825-828, Phoenix, AZ, 1999.

Neural Networks for model adaptation and novel feature extraction:

• “Non-linear Compensation for Stochastic Matching, A. C. Surendran, C.-H. Lee and M. Rahim, IEEE Transactions on Speech and Audio Processing, Vol. 6, No. 7, pp. 643-655, Nov. 1996.

• “Towards Knowledge Based Features for Large Vocabulary Automatic Speech Recognition”, B. Launay, O. Siohan, A. C. Surendran and C.-H. Lee, ICASSP ’02, pp. 807-810, Orlando, May 2002.

Microphone arrays:

• “Inverse Problems in Microphone Arrays”, A. C. Surendran, in the Handbook of Digital Signal Processing, V. Madisetti, Editor, CRC Press/IEEE Publication, 1997.

• “Spatially Selective Sound Capture for Speech and Audio Processing”, J. L. Flanagan, AC. Surendran and E. E. Jan, Speech Communication, Vol. 13, pp. 207-222, 1993.

Interesting websites:

• The Skeptic's Dictionary
• Wikipedia
• Slate Magazine

Other useless information:

• My Erdös number is 4, through John Platt
• Reference to some of my projects: TechFest 2006 demo
• Reference to Video Contextual Ads which we showed in DemoFest 2008 in SpeechTechMag, and on YouTube.

Last updated: Aug 4th 2008.