Curriculum Vitae
Bashir Rastegarpanah
Computer Science Department
Boston University
111 Cummington St
Boston, MA 02215
Web: http://cs-people.bu.edu/bashir/
Email: bashir[at]bu.edu
Research
Interests
I am mainly interested in designing algorithms for large-scale data-driven problems. My work
focuses on problems that arise in analyzing social and biological networks. In my research I
exploit tools from various areas including Optimization, Statistical Inference, Machine Learning,
and Spectral Graph Theory.
Education
Boston University, Boston, MA
Ph.D. in Computer Science, September 2014 - present
Advisor: Prof. Mark Crovella
Courses taken: Data Mining, Advanced Algorithms, Advanced Optimization, Linear Models,
Stochastic Processes, Iterative Methods for Graph Algorithms and Network Analysis.
University of Bonn, Institute of Computer Science, Bonn, Germany
M.Sc. in Computer Science, December 2013
Advisor: Prof. Christian Bauckhage
Thesis: Inferring Structural Properties of Diffusion Networks from Outbreak Data
Courses taken: Machine Learning, Pattern Recognition, Low Rank Methods for Data Analysis,
Search Engines and Web Intelligence, Foundations of Vision and Audio, Selected Topics in Signal
Processing, High Performance Networking, Mobile Communication, Cognitive Robotics.
University of Isfahan, Isfahan, Iran
B.S. in Computer Engineering, July 2010
Publication
Christian Bauckhage, Kristian Kersting, Bashir Rastegarpanah, “Collective Attention to Social Media Evolves According to Diffusion Models”, Proceedings of the companion publication of the 23rd International World Wide Web Conference, Seoul, Korea. (WWW2014)
Christian Bauckhage, Kristian Kersting, Bashir Rastegarpanah,“The Weibull as a Model of
Shortest Path Distributions in Random Networks”, 11th Workshop on Mining and Learning with Graphs , Chicago, IL. (MLG 2013)
Professional
and
Research
Experiences
Research Assistant, September 2014 - present
Data Management Group, Boston University.
Research Assistant, September 2012 - December 2013
Fraunhofer IAIS, Germany.
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As a member of Constructive Machine Learning project at the Knowledge Discovery and Machine
Learning Group, I implemented different supervised and unsupervised learning algorithms and
applied them to a database of food recipes and user reviews. In particular, I worked on recipe
and user classification, rating prediction, and automatic recipe suggestion.
Network Inference, January 2013 - September 2013
Master’s Thesis Research Project, University of Bonn.
In this project I developed a new method for inferring the global topology of diffusion networks
where the only available information consists of time series of counts of newly infected nodes. The
method is based on modeling temporal histograms of infected node counts in terms of continuous
parametric distributions. Experimenting on a large data set of spreading processes simulated
over both synthetic and real-world networks, I showed that the method is successful in predicting
structural properties of latent networks from outbreak histograms.
Research Assistant, September 2011 - January 2012
Multimedia Signal Processing Group, University of Bonn.
The project was about detecting auditory objects. I implemented Non-Negative Matrix Factorization and Non-Negative Matrix Deconvolution methods in order to discover human exclamations.
Python Boot Camp, June 2011
Bonn-Aachen International Center for Information Technology, Germany
Design and Implementation of an Infrared Transmitter using AVR Microcontroller,
May 2009, Microprocessor Lab, University of Isfahan
Skills
Programming: Python, R, MATLAB, C/C++, Java
Languages: Fluent in English and Persian(Native)
Honors and
Awards
Boston University Graduate School of Arts and Sciences fellowship, September 2014
3rd Rank in RoboCup2008 World Championship Mixed Reality League with “UI-AI” team,
Suzhou, China, July 2008
1st Rank in IranOpen2008 Mixed Reality league with “UI-AI” team, Qazvin, Iran, April 2008
Honorable Mention in ACM-ICPC Asia Regional Contest, Tehran, Iran, December 2007
Ranked in the Top 1% in Nationwide Entrance Examination of Iranian Universities, with nearly
400,000 participants in Mathematics, Physics, and Engineering fields, August 2005
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