Posts Tagged ‘Ramesh Jain’

Interchange: An Analysis of Auction Mechanics for Intersections - June 18th, 2012

Moleskins and Pens

Photo courtesy of paulworthington

Congratulations to Nitin Shantharam who passed his M.S. advancement to candidacy exam with the paper:

“Interchange: An Analysis of Auction Mechanics for Intersections”

Abstract: In urban environments a large amount of effort is directed toward alleviating mo- tor vehicle congestion including the design and implementation of complex software and hardware infrastructure. We propose a conceptually simple infrastructure that has promise for increasing performance and responsiveness of intersections to dynamic traffic conditions. The proposed system uses an auction-based mechanism at intersections to alleviate traffic congestion. We discuss the reasoning and goals of implementing auction mechanics into intersections and set empirical expectations as to how such intersections should perform. Second, we compare our simulation of a traditional intersection and an auction-based intersection and propose metrics to track and evaluate such intersections. We demonstrate that auction-based intersections perform well in single and multi-grid configurations. Finally, we present our mesoscopic simulator capable of simulating real-world topographies and show that auction-based intersections show promise in more realistic systems as well.

Committee:

  1. Prof. Donald Patterson (chair)
  2. Prof. Bill Tomlinson
  3. Prof. Ramesh Jain

Get the full text of his thesis in our tech reports section.

Great Job Nitin!

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Posted: 6/18/12 10:38 pm UTC by Make the First Comment
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GroceryTime wins Butterworth Competition - June 7th, 2011

GroceryTime check

GroceryTime award check

Congrats to Boaz Grudin and team for winning $5000.00 in this year’s Butterworth Competition.

Our dean, Hal Stern described the competition this way:

This year’s competition had 16 teams enter with 8 making it through to the final stage of product demonstration. The winning team developed GroceryTime, a mobile app that lets grocery shoppers discover the best products in the grocery store. The members were Jackie Doong, Boaz Gurdin, and Arthur Valadares. They were mentored by alum David Cheng of our Leadership Council. Their prize is $5000 and 6 months rent for space in the Irvine Incubation Center.

Here I’d like to thank Ramesh Jain and [Informatics faculty] Crista Lopes for their help in developing this year’s Butterworth Competition. Several faculty served as team mentors (Ramesh, Don Patterson, Judy Olson, Dan Frost) and I’d like to thank them as well. Finally I’d like to recognize the efforts of Kristin Huerth who put in a great deal of time and did a great job of keeping the competition going until its successful conclusion.

Our hope is to start the Butterworth Competition early in the academic year next Fall. This would enable our teams to join up with others on campus for the Business School’s business plan competition if they desire. If you would like to participate next year (as a mentor, judge, or just to help organize), please contact Kristin Huerth at khuerth@ics.uci.edu.

Thanks.


First Place Prize: $5,000
*GroceryTime*
Team Members: Jackie Doong, Boaz Gurdin, Arthur Valadares
Mentor: David Cheng

Project Description:
GroceryTime is a mobile app that lets grocery shoppers discover the best products in the grocery store. Today grocery shoppers face a paradox of choice: the abundance in grocery stores is at once gratifying and overwhelming. GroceryTime assists shoppers in two main ways: we help users decide what to buy, and give food connoisseurs a place to share their knowledge with friends and the larger food community. Users can scan barcodes to quickly read and write reviews. In addition to user reviews, brands and grocery stores can advertise directly to shoppers, influencing their buying decision at the point of sale. With GroceryTime, a tasteful life is a barcode scan away!


Second Place Prize: $3,500

*AntColony*
Team Members: Azia Foster, Hiroe Ono, Garrett Kim
Mentor: Professor Don Patterson

Seon is an android and web-based application designed to let UCI students define their community for others. Using GPS technology, Seon is able to pin point a multitude of locations, filter them, and show them in real time using the phone’s camera. Users can use this to find desired location, look up operational hours, or discover a new local place.


Third Place Prize: $1,500

*Ubiquity*
Team Members: Alberto Pareja-Lecaros, Ankita Raturi, Nathan Fulton
Mentor: Professor Ramesh Jain

Project Description:
Ubiquity is a private networking client that delivers all your digital content from any device, anywhere, anytime. It offers a Distributed Effortless Workspace (DEW) that gives user’s constant, uninterrupted access to all their files. The DEW connects to a networking infrastructure that seamlessly integrates the user’s digital content into a common Workspace, allowing them to access their files through either a web client or a Ubiquity client installed on any of their devices. Ubiquity also features Implicit Version Control, giving users the ability to pull up previous versions of the same file at any time. Ubiquity will change the way people experience their digital content.


A special thank you to:
SPONSORS
Paul Butterworth, B.S. ’74, M.S. ’81
Ilie Ardelean, B.S. ’96
Google
Yahoo!

MENTORS
Ilie Ardelean, B.S. ’96
Sherman Chen, B.S. ’89, Health Care Legal Services
David Cheng, B.S. ’91, Program Director, Healthcare Products & Solutions, IBM
Dan Frost, Lecturer, Bren:ICS
John Herpy, B.S. ’85, Boeing
Ramesh Jain, Bren Professor, Information and Computer Science, Bren:ICS
Zack Ji, B.S. ’07, Vocado
Greg Moulton, B.S. ’82
Judy Olson, Bren Professor, Information and Computer Science, Bren:ICS
Don Patterson, Assistant Professor, Informatics, Bren:ICS

JUDGES
Greg Bolcer, B.S. ’89, Ph.D. ’98, CTO and Founder, Kerosene and a Match
Matthew Jenusaitis, President & CEO, OCTANe
Kevin Kinsey, CEO, Netreo
Roger Lloyd, CMO, Immerz,
Brian Roach, Principal Consultant & CEO, Evolve Partners Inc.,
Bob Romney, Chair, Leadership Council, Bren:ICS

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Posted: 6/7/11 4:22 pm UTC by Make the First Comment
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On Improving Search in Wikipedia - June 5th, 2009

Celebration Balloons

Photo courtesy of flickr:eye2eye

Congratulations to Yasser Ganjisffar on passing his advancement to candidacy exam!

Thesis: On Improving Search in Wikipedia

Committee:
Crista Lopes (Chair)
Faryar Jabbari
Ramesh Jain
Jim Jones
Don Patterson

Wikipedia, the largest encyclopedia on the Web, is often seen as the most successful example of crowdsourcing. The encyclopedic knowledge it accumulated over the years is so large that one often uses search engines, to find information in it. In contrast to regular Web pages, Wikipedia is fairly structured, and articles are usually accompanied with history pages, categories and talk pages. The meta–data available in these pages can be analyzed to gain a better understanding of the content and quality of the articles. We analyze the quality of search results of the current major Web search engines (Google, Yahoo! and Live) in Wikipedia. We discuss how the rich meta–data available in wiki pages can be used to provide better search results in Wikipedia. Built on the studies on “Wisdom of Crowd” and the effectiveness of the knowledge collected by a large number of people, we investigate the effect of incorporating the extent of review of an article in the quality of rankings of the search results. The extent of review is measured by the number of distinct editors contributed to the articles and is extracted by processing Wikipedia’s history pages. Our experimental results show that re–ranking search results of the three major Web search engines using the review feature improves quality of their rankings for Wikipedia–specific searches. We also compare the effectiveness of the proposed review–based ranking with PageRank based
ranking.

Congrats Yasser!

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Posted: 6/5/09 1:04 pm UTC by Make the First Comment
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