DAC Student Spotlight: Bijaya Adhikar

Bijaya Adhikari, a Ph.D. student in computer science, was attracted to the Discovery Analytics Center by the opportunity to solve data mining problems that are not only theoretically interesting, but have real-world applications, as well.

Adhikari’s core research focuses on graph mining and topics relating to social network analysis, such as community detection, immunization, influence maximization, and information. His interests also lie in machine learning, theoretical computer science, and algorithms.

Even as an undergraduate, the idea of developing methods for discovering non-obvious, non-trivial, and useful information and knowledge from seemingly arbitrary heap of massive data appealed to him.

“Seemingly unrelated processes like contagious diseases (e.g. flu and ebola) spreading over a population, inaccurate news articles and rumors dissemination over prevalent social networks, and word-of-mouth discussion can all be modeled as propagation over networks,” Adhikari said.

“We know that network structure plays a vital role in facilitating — or inhibiting — these processes,” he said. “So, we can solve many critical problems in the real world from various domains by leveraging graph mining techniques. Both in my past and current research, I have developed data mining tools for a succinct propagation-oriented network.”

Adhikari, who holds a bachelor’s degree in computer engineering from Vistula University in Warsaw, Poland, said that the “prospect of teaming up “with world-class researchers” also led him to DAC. Collaborative research with his advisor, B.Aditya Prakash, other faculty, and fellow Ph.D. students, has been presented at leading conferences and published in journal publications, including SIAM International Conference on Data Mining (SDM); The Web Conference (WWW); Pacific-Asia Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining; (PAKDD); and IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering (TKDE). (Links to the papers, slides, and codes can be found here.)

Most recently, Adhikari presented “NetGist: Learning to generate task-based network summaries” at the IEEE International Conference on Data Mining (ICDM 2018) in Singapore this past November.

While a DAC student, he gained real-world experience interning at WalmartLabs in Sunnyvale, California. Adhikari was part of the Search and Relevance team which focused on mining relations between queries based on customer’s engagement data. He hopes to graduate in Spring 2020 and continue working in the data mining field.