Paul - Alexandru Chirita, Resume

 

 

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06.06.07

 

 

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  1. Key Qualifications

  2. Education

  3. Selected Publications

  4. Books

  5. Relevant Experience

  6. Other Activities

 

Key Qualifications

  • 4+ years experience with search engine technology and data mining algorithms.

  • Excellent skills in project management, supervision, technical writing, as well as oral communication.

  • Abstract thinker, with good problem solving and organizational skills.

  • Good knowledge of data structures and algorithms, databases, foundational statistics, and mathematics.

  • Passionate for numbers, familiar with microeconomic theory and competitive strategy analysis.

  • Creative, success driven team player who continuously meets and exceeds goals.

 

Education

2003 – 2007                 University of Hannover, Hannover, Germany

  • Ph.D. in Information Retrieval: Emerging applications of link analysis for ranking. Awarded the "Summa Cum Laude" graduation distinction.

  • Supervisors: Dr. W. Nejdl (Univ. of Hannover), Dr. R. Baeza-Yates (Yahoo!).

1998 – 2003                 “Politehnica” University, Bucharest, Romania

  • M. S. in Artificial Intelligence and Computer Graphics (Thesis: “Personalized web search”).

  • B. S. in Computer Science (Thesis: “Analysis of the S@TML language to provide support for JavaCard applets”).

  • Graduated within top 1% and received the maximum grade for both graduation theses.

2000 – 2001                 Ecole Polytechnique, Paris, France

  • EU funded scholarship. Awarded the “Très honorable” distinction (maximum possible) for my results during the sponsored year.

Additional Courses

  • ACM / Digital Think courses and certifications on project planning, personnel management, negotiations, business communications and etiquette.

  • Project Management Certified Professional (By Brainbench, 2006).

  • Extensive extracurricular courses on most areas of Information Retrieval and Data Mining taught by the top worldwide experts:

    • WEB-BAR 2004: Bertinoro Advanced Summer School in Web Information Retrieval and Mining, Bertinoro, Italy (By P. Raghavan and H. Schütze).

    • ACM SIGIR 2006: Tutorials on Web Advertising (By R. Baeza-Yates, P. Raghavan, and A. Broder) and on Language Models for Information Retrieval (By C-X. Zhai).

    • ACM SIGIR 2005: Tutorials on Database Information Retrieval (By R. Baeza-Yates and M. Consens) and on Multimedia Information Retrieval (By D. Ponceleon and M. Slaney).

    • ACM SIGIR 2004: Tutorials on Web Search Architectures (By K.-M. Risvik and M. Hearst) and on XML Information Retrieval (By R. Baeza-Yates and N. Fuhr).

  • Graduated a leading national high school within top 2%. Major in Computer Science and minor in Economics.

 

Selected Publications

  • Using ODP Metadata to Personalize Search. Paul - Alexandru Chirita, Wolfgang Nejdl, Raluca Paiu, Christian Kohlscütter. In Proc. of the 28th ACM Intl. SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (2005).

  • Personalized Query Expansion for the Web. By Paul - Alexandru Chirita, Claudiu Firan, Wolfgang Nejdl. In Proceedings of the 30th ACM International SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval, Amsterdam, Netherlands (2007).

  • Site Level Noise Removal for Search Engines. Andre Carvalho, Paul – Alexandru Chirita, Edleno Silva de Moura, Pavel Calado, Wolfgang Nejdl. In Proc. of the 15th Intl. World Wide Web Conference (2006).

  • P-TAG: Large Scale Automatic Generation of Personalized Annotation TAGs for the Web. By Paul – Alexandru Chirita, Stefania Costache, Siegfried Handschuh, Wolfgang Nejdl. In Proceedings of the 16th International World Wide Web Conference (WWW), Banff, Canada (2007).

  • MailRank: Using Ranking for Spam Detection. Paul - Alexandru Chirita, Jörg Diederich, Wolfgang Nejdl. In Proc. of the 14th ACM Intl. CIKM Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (2005).

  • Analyzing User Behavior to Rank Desktop Items. Paul – Alexandru Chirita, Wolfgang Nejdl. Paul - Alexandru Chirita, Wolfgang Nejdl. In Proceedings of the 13th International Symposium on String Processing and Information Retrieval (SPIRE), Glasgow, United Kingdom (2006).

  • Additional 26 published papers and book chapters on Personalized Web Search, Desktop Search, Collaborative Filtering, as well as Peer-to-Peer Search and Publish/Subscribe Systems.

Books

  • Data Structures and Algorithms in C++ using the STL. Valeriu Iorga, Cristian Opincaru, Corina Stratan, Paul - Alexandru Chirita. PoliRom Publishing House, Bucharest, Romania, 2005; 352 pages, 16 x 23 cm.

  • C and C++ Programming Problems. Valeriu Iorga, Paul - Alexandru Chirita, Corina Stratan, Cristian Opincaru. Niculescu Publishing House, Bucharest, Romania, 2004; 256 pages, 16 x 23 cm.

  • Computer Networks, Fourth Edition.  Andrew S. Tanenbaum. Co-translated the book into Romanian.

 

RELEVANT Experience

2003 – 2007                 L3S Research Center, Hannover, Germany

Researcher / Project Manager

  • Previously employed as an intern (03.2003 – 08.2003), junior researcher (08.2003 – 03.2004), and team manager within the local iSearch project on designing personalized search algorithms (03.2004 – 10.2005)

  • Manager of the EU Nepomuk project on building the Social Semantic Desktop, as well as co-author of its funding proposal (approx. 11.5 Mio. Euro overall, with an L3S share of about 1 Mio. Euro for a period of 3 years).

  • Determined Information Retrieval to be a new strategic interest area for the institute: First employee working on this topic, whereas currently 15 researchers are involved in Information Retrieval related activities.

  • Served as a technical consultant for other projects in order to provide Information Retrieval specific expertise.

  • Supplied the institute with new high quality researchers by acquiring additional partners and developing regular recruiting sessions with them.

2006                            Yahoo!, Barcelona, Spain

Visiting Researcher

  • Data mining to identify trendy authors / postings within the blog database of the search engine.

2005                            Federal University of Amazonas, Manaus, Brazil

Visiting Researcher

  • Designed algorithms to locate spam pages and hyperlinks over the World Wide Web (together with Dr. Edleno de Moura, creator of Google Brazil).

2004 – 2006                 University of Hannover, Hannover, Germany

Teaching Assistant (Internet Technologies)

  • Besides teaching, supervised 6 master students to complete their graduation thesis in Information Retrieval topics.

2002 – 2003                 National Center for Information Technology, Bucharest, Romania

Research Assistant (EU Codestar project), C++ OOP Tutor

2001 – 2003                 “Politehnica” University, Bucharest, Romania

Teaching Assistant (C/C++ Programming, Data Structures and Algorithms, Numeric Algorithms, Computer Systems)

2001                            Schlumberger Industries, Paris, France

Wireless Engineering Intern

 

Other Activities

  • Fluent in English, French, German, and Romanian. Some knowledge of Spanish.

  • Participated in different official and unofficial organizations since 1994. Class union leader during 1994-1998, as well as co-founder and leader of the OkCode Group of software engineers during 1998-2003.

  • 15 years of interaction with the business world through the 3 companies run into my family.

  • Awarded several science and technology related prizes, including Best Romanian Undergraduate Research Project of the Year (2000), Best Mathematics Research Project (2000), Best Physics Research Project (2000), and 3rd prize at the National History Olympiad (1993).

  • Awarded a (merit) scholarship by the “Politehnica” University of Bucharest for the prominent professional results during all five years of study.

  • Hobbies include history, watching movies, as well as playing tennis and basketball.

Created by Paul - Alexandru Chirita, chirita [AT] l3s [DOT] de.

Latest Update: 06.06.07