Steven P. Crain
US Citizen
http://www.cc.gatech.edu/∼scrain6
Highlights
• Strong research in consumer health, social networks, recommendation, topic modeling and information
retrieval
• Passion for teaching
• Solid machine learning background
• More than a decade of experience as a software engineer
• Experience handling large datasets
Brief Teaching Statement
I absolutely love teaching, and am dedicated to ensuring that students have a solid foundation in computer
science and practical experience with the techniques and technologies that are valuable to employers.
Brief Research Statement
I am a machine learning researcher with broad expertise, including hierarchical classification, boosted decision
trees, support vector machines and graphical models, including topic models. My approach is application
focused, applying existing and innovative machine learning techniques as appropriate to solve a specific
problem. I am interested in applications that benefit consumers, such as promoting consumer health or
extending the range of resources that can be found in Web search.
Active Research
Online Medical Support Group Recommendation and Enrichment
Sep. 2010 – present
We use collaborative filtering and language modeling approaches to help consumers find online support
groups and discussion threads that will engage the consumer and promote his health.
Censoring Hazardous Medical Content
May 2011 – present
There are some communities that promote alternative health behavior that commonly results in life-threatening
complications. We are developing language models that can identify hazardous resources on the Web so that
Web providers can avoid unwittingly promoting these behaviors.
Revised May 5, 2012.
Publications
Conference Papers
S.P. Crain, K. Zhou, H. Zha. Recommendation in online health communities. In submission.
S.P. Crain, S.-H. Yang, H. Zha. Understanding group dynamics in health forums. In submission.
S.-H. Yang, S.P. Crain, H. Zha. Bridging the language gap: topic-level adaptation for cross-domain
knowledge transfer. AI Stat. 2011.
S.P. Crain, S.-H. Yang, Y. Jiao, H. Zha. Dialect topic modeling for improved consumer medical search.
AMIA. 2010.
Short Papers
S. Syed-Abdul, L.F. Luque, S.P. Crain, M.-H. Hsu, Y.-C. Li, W.-S. Jian, Y.-C. Wang, K. Dorjsuren,
Z. Chuluunbaatar, A. Nguyen. Social Media Promoting Anorexia: The YouTube case. In submission.
S.P. Crain, J. Huang, H. Zha. A scalable assistant librarian: hierarchical classification of books. SIGIR.
2008.
Survey Papers
S.P. Crain, K. Zhou, S.-H. Yang, H. Zha. Dimensionality reduction and topic modeling: from latent
semanitc indexing to latent Dirichlet allocation and beyond. In C.C. Aggarwal and C. Zhai, eds.
Mining text data. Kluwer. To appear.
Technical Reports
S.P. Crain, Y. Jiao. Its time you DROVE: Deep retrieval with ontological visualization and exploration.
Oak Ridge National Laboratory. 2009.
Software and Datasets
S.P. Crain, H. Zha. Consumer medical information retrieval relevance judgments. Georgia Tech. 2010.
R. Curtin, R. Riegel, G. Boyer, N. Vasiloglou, N. Syed, A.G. Gray. MLPACK. 2010. (contributed belief
propagation implementation)
Talks
S.P. Crain. Burning your security at three ends: security trust and privacy in the age of disclosure. Georgia
Tech. 2008.
Miscellaneous Publications
D.E. Knuth. The art of computer programming. Addison-Wesley. Vol. 1. 2002. (contribution)
Teaching
I absolutely love teaching, and am dedicated to ensuring that students have a solid foundation in computer
science and practical experience with the techniques and technologies that are valuable to employers.
Teaching Experience
Instructor
Georgia Institute of Technology
• CS 4642 Numerical Analysis I
May – Aug. 2012
Atlanta, GA
Undergraduate Teaching Assistant
1989 – 1991
Michigan State University
E. Lansing, Michigan
• Teaching the weekly recitation sessions for calculus courses, holding office hours and grading exams.
• Regularly taught new material in fourth-trimester calculus course.
Senior Software and Data Architect
Mar. 2000 – Aug 2007
Primus Telecommunications
Lynn, Massachusetts
• Designed and presented numerous technical training sessions including efficient SQL, security, Unix
scripting and use of advanced software features.
Royal Rangers Commander
Rescue Atlanta
• Teaching boys in a scouting environment.
Sep. 2008 – May 2009
Atlanta, Georgia
Royal Rangers Commander
Church of the Redeemer
• Teaching boys in a scouting environment.
Sep. 1994 – May 1998
S. Hamilton, Massachusetts
Teaching Workshops Attended
Georgia Institute of Technology
• Efficient and effective grading
• Developing your teaching philosophy and portfolio
• Making teaching exciting
• Motivating students to learn
• Making learning accessible to everyone
• Academic faculty jobs panel
• Graduate career symposium
2009 – 2011
Atlanta, Georgia
Background
Education
Ph.D., Computer Science
Georgia Institute of Technology
Thesis: Personalized Search and Recommendation for Health
Information Resources
Aug. 2007 – Aug. 2012 (anticipated)
Atlanta, Georgia
Advisor: Prof. Hongyuan Zha
GPA:
3.93/4.00
B.S., Mathematics
Michigan State University
Honors: With high honor, Member of the Honors College
Sep. 1988 – Jun. 1992
East Lansing, Michigan
GPA:
3.91/4.00
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Area:
Computer science
Sep. 2006 – May 2007
Cambridge, Massachusetts
GPA:
5.00/5.00
July 1997
Springfield, Missouri
4.00/4.00
Assemblies of God Theological Seminary
Area:
Pastoral ministry
GPA:
Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary
Area:
Pastoral ministry
Sep. 1992 – Apr. 1996
S. Hamilton, Massachusetts
GPA:
3.38/4.00
Affiliations
American Medical Informatics Association, student member
Association for Computing Machinery, professional member
• Special Interest Group on Computer Science Education
IEEE, student member
• Computer Society
Work History
Instructor
Georgia Institute of Technology
• CS 4642 Numerical Analysis I
May – Aug. 2012
Atlanta, GA
Graduate Research Assistant
Aug. 2007 – Present
Georgia Institute of Technology
Atlanta, Georgia
• Intradialectical Information Retrieval (Zha)
• Query-dependent document ranking (Zha)
• Semi-supervised latent dialect detection (Zha)
• Weblog sentiment analysis (Zha)
• From libraries to the Web: large scale hierarchical classification of book repositories (Zha)
• Nearly non-negative SVD for Non-Negative Matrix Factorization (Park)
• Large scale data; Hierarchical classification; Learning to rank; Social network analysis; Text processing;
Online learning; Matrix factorization; Gradient boosted decision trees; Support vector machines; Latent
Dirichlet allocation; Graphical models; Belief propagation; Java; C; C++; Unix scripting; Matlab; SQL.
Research Intern
Summer 2011
Microsoft Bing Social Search
Mountain View, California
• Developed feature representation of social network users at scale to predict expensive social metrics.
• Regression; Large scale data; Distributed matrix factorization; Social network user modeling; Unix
scripting; Java Web development.
Research Intern
Summer 2010
Microsoft Bing Social Search
Mountain View, California
• Clustered social network users jointly by user features and audience features to build a predictive model
of user authority.
• Distributed clustering; Large scale data; Social network user modeling; Unix scripting.
Research Intern
Summer 2009
Applied Software Engineering Research
Oak Ridge National Lab, Oak Ridge, Tennessee
• Developed a modular application to enable users to perform broad medical queries (seeking a set of
result pages instead of a single page) and visualize the set of results.
• Natural language processing; Keyword extraction; Java GUI development; Unix scripting.
Research Intern
Summer 2008
Mitsubishi Electric Research Lab
Cambridge, Massachusetts
• Developed a tree-structured Adaboost algorithm for face detection.
• Large scale data; Time critical machine learning; Adaboost; Decision trees; C++; Unix scripting;
Matlab.
Senior Software and Data Architect
Mar. 2000 – Aug 2007
Primus Telecommunications
Lynn, Massachusetts
• Large scale data (Sybase)
• System administration, integration, development (LDAP; RADIUS; Linux)
• Database architecture, administration and development (Sybase; Transact-SQL; Java enterprise; Perl)
• Security design, system programing, database, Web application, auditing
• Web application development (Weblogic; Apache; Cocoon; Java enterprise; XML; XSLT)
• System programming (C; Apache module development; Java internals)
Senior Software Developer and Unix System Administrator
Eco Software
• Unix system administration (SunOS; Solaris)
• Database administration (Sybase)
• System, security programming (RADIUS, encryption, Unix RPC)
• Database application development
Feb. 1996 – Mar 2000
Lynn, Massachusetts
Library Automation Assistant
Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary
• Unix system administration (Linux)
• Hardware repair and specification
• Software development (data conversion, device drivers)
Sep. 1992 – Jan. 1996
South Hamilton, Massachusetts
Maintenance Coordinator
Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary
• Unix system administration (Linux)
• Hardware repair and specification
• Software development (data conversion, device drivers)
Sep. 1992 – Aug. 1993
South Hamilton, Massachusetts
Undergraduate Teaching Assistant
1989 – 1991
Michigan State University
E. Lansing, Michigan
• Teaching the weekly recitation sessions for calculus courses, holding office hours and grading exams.
• Regularly taught new material in fourth-trimester calculus course.
Undergraduate Research Assistant
Michigan State University
• Figured out how to use fluid dynamics application and provided training
Sep. 1988 – Apr. 1989
E. Lansing, Michigan
Dishwasher
ChemTrend
• Washing laboratory glassware
Oct. 1986 – May 1987
Howell, Michigan
Service
Vice President, Graduate Student Council
Georgia Tech
Computation Science and Engineering Community Social Engineers
Georgia Tech
Library Committee
Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary
Aug. 2009 – Aug. 2011
Atlanta, Georgia
Jul. 2009 – May. 2010
Atlanta, Georgia
Sep. 1993 – May 1994
S. Hamilton, Massachusetts
Treasurer
Christians in Action student group, Michigan State University
May 1989 – May 1992
E. Lansing, Michigan
Board Member
Christians in Action student group, Michigan State University
Jan. 1992 – May 1992
E. Lansing, Michigan
Volunteer Work
Audio-visual staff
Rescue Atlanta
Board Member
Church of the Redeemer
Jul. 2007 – present
Atlanta, Georgia
Jun. 1996 – Jun. 1997
S. Hamilton, Massachusetts
Honors
Dept. of Homeland Security Career Development Grant
Georgia Institute of Technology
• Full stipend, full tuition, fees and travel.
Oak Ridge Computational Science and Engineering Fellowship
Oak Ridge National Lab
• Full stipend, full tuition.
President’s Fellowship
Georgia Institute of Technology
• Stipend.
Second place, Fleischman’s Bread Competition
Topsfield Fair
Aug. 2010 – present
Atlanta, Georgia
Aug. 2009 – May 2010
Oak Ridge, Tennessee
Aug. 2007 – present
Atlanta, Georgia
Oct. 2004
Topsfield, Massachusetts
Team Ministry Scholarship
Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary
• Full tuition.
Jan. 1993 – Feb. 1996
South Hamilton, Massachusetts
Byington Scholar
Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary
• Stipend.
Sep. 1994 – Aug. 1995
South Hamilton, Massachusetts
Phi Beta Kappa
Michigan State University
• Honor society.
May 1992
E. Lansing, Michigan
Pi Mu Epsilon
Michigan State University
• Mathematics honor society.
May 1991
E. Lansing, Michigan
Award for Outstanding Performance in Undergraduate
Physical and Analytical Chemistry
Michigan State University
May 1991
E. Lansing, Michigan
Outstanding achievement award
Michigan State University College of Engineering
• Plaque.
May 1990
E. Lansing, Michigan
Chi Omega Epsilon
Michigan State University
• Chemical engineering honor society.
May 1990
E. Lansing, Michigan
Certificate of Honor
Christians in Action student group, Michigan State University
Outstanding Chemical Engineering Sophomore
Michigan State University Dept. of Chemical Engineering
• Reference book.
May 1990
E. Lansing, Michigan
May 1989
E. Lansing, Michigan
National Merit Scholarship
National Merit Scholarship Corp.
• Tuition.
Sep. 1988 – Jun. 1992
Evanston, Illinois
Gerstacker Award
Michigan State University
• Stipend.
Sep. 1988 – Jun. 1989
E. Lansing, Michigan