Alum Venu Satuluri's Ph.D. dissertation was a finalist in the 2013 Best Doctoral Dissertation Award competition sponsored by ACM's Special Interest Group on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (SIGKDD). This prestigious award has been given annually for five years and recognizes excellence in research by doctoral candidates in the field of Knowledge Discovery and Data mining.
Satuluri's work, titled "Scalable Clustering of Modern Networks," focused on a fundamental analytical task related to graphs - the discovery of the natural communities or clusters from a graph, or graph clustering in short. His thesis addresses this problem from two directions - in one direction, it proposes novel algorithms for the core clustering task based on the multi-level simulation of stochastic flows; in the second direction, it proposes intelligent pre-processing strategies that transform the graph to enable fast and accurate clustering subsequently. Taken together, the thesis provides solutions for the clustering problem that are commensurate with the complexity, scale and noisiness of modern data.
Currently working for Twitter, Venu graduated from CSE in March 2012. His advisor was Dr. Srinivasan Parthasarathy. He received his undergraduate degree (B.Tech.) at National Institute of Technology Karnataka, Surathkal.