I am a doctoral student in the Computer Science dept. at the Kno.e.sis Research Center in Wright State University and was previously with the LSDIS Lab in the University of Georgia. I moved to Ohio when my advisor Amit Sheth took up the LexisNexis Ohio Eminent Scholar position in Jan 2007. I got my bachelors in Management Studies with a specialization in Computer Science from the Birla Institute of Technology and Science, (BITS-Pilani) in India.

My doctoral thesis research is supported by the following grants:

IBM UIMA Innovation Award 2007

Microsoft's Beyond Search - Semantic Computing and Internet Economics Award, 2008

Research

I am interested in the analysis of content in social media - in understanding what people are writing about (named entity identification and disambiguation), how people write (what words are they using in talking about an entity), and why they write (intentions behind their writing, what sentiments are they expressing) on social media platforms.

I am also interested in how these 3 perspectives, along with certain contextual properties of data (when, where they were generated) and the network they were generated in (structure of a network) bring in a social context that allows development of socially aware applications.

More information here

Research Internships

I have had the opportunity to work at some of the best research labs in my area during my internships.

Summer 2006 - Hewlett Packard Research Lab, Palo Alto, CA - Systems and Storage Team

Summer 2007 - IBM Almaden Research Lab, San Jose, CA - Semantic Super Computing Team

Spring 2008 - School of Information, U. Of Cal., Berkeley - Prof. Marti Hearst

Summer 2009 - Microsoft Research, Redmond, WA - Social Streams / Live Labs Team

I also mentored an intern at the Knoesis Center in Summer 2008. We worked on identifying topically relevant keywords from noisy user-generated content on MySpace and Facebook. More information here.

Recent Publications, Talks etc.

Complete list Jun 2009

1.Poster paper at ICWSM 2009

Meenakshi Nagarajan, Marti A. Hearst. An Examination of Language Use in Online Dating Personals, 3rd Int'l AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media, ICWSM 2009

2.Presentation at Microsoft's Beyond Search Workshop - Redmond, WA, June 10, 11 2009

3. Full paper at WI 2009

Meenakshi Nagarajan, Kamal Baid, Amit P. Sheth, and Shaojun Wang, Monetizing User Activity on Social Networks - Challenges and Experiences, 2009 IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conference on Web Intelligence, Sep 15-18 2009, Milan, Italy, to appear

4. Full paper at WISE 2009

Meenakshi Nagarajan, Karthik Gomadam, Amit Sheth, Ajith Ranabahu, Raghava Mutharaju and Ashutosh Jadhav,Spatio-Temporal-Thematic Analysis of Citizen-Sensor Data - Challenges and Experiences, Tenth International Conference on Web Information Systems Engineering, Oct 5-7, 2009, Poland, to appear