Mehrnoosh Sameki (MaryNoosh)
Department of Computer Science
Boston University
Boston, MA, USA
Phone: +1-617-669-0223
Email: sameki [at] bu.edu
Homepage: http://cs-people.bu.edu/sameki/
Personal
Citizenship: Iranian, US Permanent Resident
Research
Interests
Human Computation and Crowdsourcing, Human-Computer Interaction, Computer Vision, Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing
Education
Boston University, Boston, MA. (Sept. 2012- present)
Ph.D. in Computer Science. Advisor: Prof. M. Betke.
Sharif University of Technology, Tehran, Iran. (Sept. 2007 - Jan. 2012)
B.Sc. in Computer Engineering. Advisor: Prof. H. Asadi
Skills
Programming Languages: C, C++, Java, Python, MATLAB, Assembly, Verilog HDL
Software Tools: Eclipse, Visual Studio
Design Tools: Microsoft Visio, Axure, Photoshop
Web/DB: HTML, CSS, Django
Mobile Technology: Android Programming
Publications M. Sameki, D. Gurari, and M. Betke, ICORD: Intelligent Collection of Redundant Data
and Posters
A Dynamic System for Crowdsourcing Cell Segmentations Accurately and Efficiently,
The International Workshop on Computer Vision for Microscopy Image Analysis (CVMI), in conjunction with the IEEE Conf. on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), June 2016.
M. Sameki, A. Barua, and P. Paritosh, Rigorously Collecting Commonsense Judgments
for Complex Question-Answer Content, HCOMP (AAAI Conference on Human Computation
and Crowdsourcing), San Diego, CA, 2015. [PDF - Presentation Video]
M. Sameki, D. Gurari, and M. Betke, Predicting the Quality of Crowdsourced Image
Drawings from Crowd Behavior, HCOMP (AAAI Conference on Human Computation and
Crowdsourcing), San Diego, CA, 2015. [PDF - Poster]
M. Sameki, D. Gurari, and M. Betke, Characterizing Image Segmentation Behavior of
the Crowd, Conference on Collective Intelligence, June 2015.
J. Zhang, S. Ma, M. Sameki, S. Sclaroff, M. Betke, Z. Lin, X. Shen, B. Price, and R. Mech,
Salient Object Subitizing, In Proc. IEEE Conf. on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
(CVPR), Boston, MA, 2015. [PDF - Webpage]
D. Gurari, D. Theriault, M. Sameki, B. Isenberg, T. A. Pham, A. Purwada, P. Solski, M. Walker,
C. Zhang, J. Y. Wong, and M. Betke, How to Collect Segmentations for Biomedical Images?
A Benchmark Evaluating the Performance of Experts, Crowdsourced Non-Experts,
and Algorithms , IEEE Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV), 2015.
[PDF - Dataset] - Presentation Video]
D. Gurari, D. Theriault, M. Sameki, and M. Betke, How to Use Level Set Methods to
Accurately Find Boundaries of Cells in Biomedical Images? Evaluation of Six Methods Paired with Automated and Crowdsourced Initial Contours, The Interactive Medical
Image Computation Workshop (IMIC), in conjunction with the conference on Medical Image Computing and Computer Assisted Intervention (MICCAI) Boston, MA, September 14, 2014. [PDF Presentation Video] - Code] (Best Paper Award)
Mehrnoosh Sameki (MaryNoosh)
J. Zhang, M. Sameki, R. West, H. Xi, Implementation of an ARM9-compatible Softmicroprocessor on FPGA. The BU Computer Science Annual Industrial Affiliates Program
(IAP) Research Open House, 2014. [PDF - Slides]
M. Sameki, R. West, A Real-Time Predictable File System for Flash Memory. The BU
Computer Science Annual Industrial Affiliates Program (IAP) Research Open House, 2013. [PDF]
E. Azimzadeh, M. Sameki, M. Goudarzi, Performance Analysis of Android Underlying
Virtual Machine in Mobile Phones, The 2nd IEEE International Conference on Consumer
Electronics (ICCE), Berlin, Germany, Sep. 2012. [PDF - Presentation Video]
M. Sameki, A. Shambayati, H. Asadi, I/O Scheduling Algorithms to Improve Performance
of Flash-Based Solid State Disks, Technical Report, Sharif University of Technology, 2011.
[PDF - Poster]
Research
Research Assistant in the Image and Video Computing Group . (May 2014 - present)
Experiences
- ICORD: Intelligent Collection of Redundant Data A Dynamic System for Crowdsourcing Cell
Segmentations Accurately and Efficiently.
We introduce a dynamic data collection strategy in crowdsourcing experiments that dynamically assesses the quality of crowd work. We propose a system that predicts the accuracy
of a segmented region from analysis of (1) its geometric and intensity-based features and (2)
the crowd workers behavioral features. Based on this score, ICORD dynamically determines
if the annotation accuracy is satisfactory or if a higher-quality annotation should be sought
out in another round of crowdsourcing.
- Designing and Building an Online Crowdsourcing Platform for 2016 U.S. Presidential Election
Tweet Analysis.
We are designing a human computation framework to develop reliable and valid methods
to analyze text-based large-scale social data (e.g., tweets) in the context of communication
research. We aim to develop a comprehensive data-analytics framework that combines the
state of the art in machine learning, crowdsourcing, manual content analysis methodology in
social science, and domain expertise in political communication.
- Designing and Building an Online Crowdsourcing Platform for Combining the Annotation Efforts of Humans and Computers for Image Segmentation Analysis. We conducted a formative
study with 12 domain experts to examine how to leverage human efforts and computer vision
algorithms to segment objects in 1,037 images. We then implemented two pure crowdsourcing
methods, two pure computer methods, and two hybrid crowdsourcing-computer methods and
compared their results to annotations of experts on 405 objects in everyday and biomedical
images. (Joint work with D. Gurari)
- Designing and Building an Online Crowdsourcing Platform to Investigating the Impact of
Contour Initialization on Segmentation Quality. We designed and built a crowdsourcing
experiment by using an online image annotation tool, LabelMe, and asked crowdsourced
humans to annotate biomedical images to examine whether paid non-expert crowdsourced
workers can be leveraged to expedite successful use of level set methods for biomedical images.
(Joint work with D. Gurari)
- Exploration of Assistive Technologies Used by People with Quadriplegia. We conducted indepth semi-structured interviews with people with quadriplegia, focusing on their usage and
adoption of assistive technologies, as well as regular desktop and touch pads, and their opinions
about these technologies. (Joint work with W. Feng)
Research Assistant in the Operating Systems Group. (Sept. 2012 - May 2014)
- Design of a Flash-Based Real-Time File System.
Research Assistant in the Data Storage Systems and Networks Laboratory. (Feb. 2010
- June 2012) Under the Supervision of Prof. H. Asadi
- Thesis Project: Design and Implementation of an Efficient I/O Scheduling Algorithm for
Solid-State Disk Drives.
In this project, we extracted information from the disk I/O trace and investigated that current
Mehrnoosh Sameki (MaryNoosh)
approaches to I/O scheduling are not ideally suited for SSDs. Afterwards, we proposed an
SSD-friendly I/O scheduler which can remove the SSD’s shortcomings, implemented it in the
Linux kernel, and evaluated our implementation by using I/O tools such as Blktrace and
DiskSim (Disk Simulator).
Designing an Efficient Architecture for a Low-Power Dalvik Processor, Under the Supervision of Prof. M. Goudarzi.
The project entailed the implementation of a low-power hardware Dalvik processor for Androidbased mobile phones, which is capable of running Dalvik bytecodes natively.
Work
Software Engineering Intern at Google Research, San Franscisco. (June. 2015 - present) Under
Experiences
Supervision of Dr. Praveen Paritosh
- Designing and Improving a Human Computation Framework to Better Understand Diverse Question Answer Content in Community QA Websites .
Software Engineering Intern at Google Research, San Franscisco. (May. 2016 - present) Under
Supervision of Dr. Praveen Paritosh
Teaching
Boston University
Experiences
- Introduction to Computer Science (Spring 2013), Advanced Software Systems - Unix Environment Programming (Spring 2014), Artificial Intelligence (Spring 2015) .
Sharif University of Technology
- Digital System Design (2010), Computer Architecture (2010), Logic Design (2010), Data
Structures and Algorithms (2011), Linear Control Systems (2011).
Honors and Google’s Intern Travel Grant Award for Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing. (2015)
Awards
Selected for Inclusion to 10XList (The Most Talented Women Engineers in College). (2015)
Travel Grant Award for Collective Intelligence Conference. (2015)
Travel Grant Award for CRA-W Graduate Cohort Workshop. (2015)
Student Volunteer Scholarship for CSCW Conference (The ACM Conference on Computer-Supported
Cooperative Work and Social Computing). (2015)
IMIC-MICCAI Best Paper Award for Innovative Idea. (2014)
Travel Grant Award for CRA-W Graduate Cohort Workshop. (2014)
Research and Teaching Fellowship from Boston University Graduate School of Arts and
Sciences. (2012)
Admission to Sharif University of Technology, Ranked 415th among more than 300,000 participants in National University Entrance Exam. (2007)
Awarded a Certificate of Education from Tehran/Iran ACM Chapter (Association for Computing Machinery) in Java/J2EE Programming. (2008)
Invited
Talks
Technical
- Rigorously Collecting Commonsense Judgments for Complex Question Answer
Content. Paper Presentation, Crowdsourcing Breakthroughs for Language Technology Applications, in conjunction with the conference on Human Computation & Crowdsourcing
(HCOMP) San Diego, CA, November 9, 2015.
- How to Use Level Set Methods to Accurately Find Boundaries of Cells in Biomedical Images? Evaluation of Six Methods Paired with Automated and Crowdsourced Initial Contours. Paper Presentation, The Interactive Medical Image Computation Workshop (IMIC), in conjunction with the conference on Medical Image Computing and
Computer Assisted Intervention (MICCAI) Boston, MA, September 14, 2014.
Mehrnoosh Sameki (MaryNoosh)
- Characterizing Image Segmentation Behavior of the Crowd. Paper Presentation,
Collective Intelligence Conference (CI) Santa Clara, CA, June 3, 2015.
Outreach
- Introduction to Human-Computer Interaction. Presentation to high school females from the
Boston community, The Artemis Project, Boston University, MA, USA, August 2014.
- Introduction to Computer Vision and Human-Computer Interaction. Presentation to high
school females from the Boston community, Summer Pathways in Science and Engineering,
Boston University, MA, USA, July 2014.
- Graduate College of Arts and Science Veteran International Teaching Fellow Orientation.
Presentation to incoming international graduate students of school of arts and sciences, Boston
University, MA, USA, August 2013 and 2014.