• [Italian Magazine Focus Extra (Pages 76,77,78 of Extra) mentions about our OSN based Flu Trends research] - Download [Media Coverage](pdf format).
• [Georgia Department of Public Health News] - "Researchers Now Using Social Media to Track Flu Epidemics."
• [Computer Science Department News] - Achrekar defends PhD thesis on using social networks to predict flu trends on September 6, 2012. Download [Thesis](pdf format).
• Harshavardhan Achrekar awarded Outstanding Computer Science Graduate Student at University of Massachusetts Lowell - 2012
• [Computer Science Department News] - "Twitter improves Seasonal Influenza Prediction" , Health Informatics, Portugal, February 2012 received Best Student Paper Award. Download [Publication](pdf format).
• "Researchers can Follow Outbreaks in Real Time" article published in University of Massachusetts, Lowell news by Edwin L, Aguirre on October 07, 2011 . [Link]
• "Tweets speak volumes about flu epidemics in USA" article published in Computer Science Department news by Martin, Fred on April 21, 2011 . [Link]

• Softwares
• Research
• Education
• Publications
• Experience
• Projects
• Awards
• Activities

Harshavardhan (Harsh) Achrekar , is a Ph.D from Department of Computer Science at University of Massachusetts Lowell. His Advisor was Dr. Benyuan Liu. His research area includes Social Network Analysis , with a focus on:

• Search within the Social Network
• Analyze and Measure Dynamics of Online Social Networks (OSN's)
• Predicting Flu trends/patterns in Participatory Networks
• Text Mining and Information extraction from messages posted on the Web.

His expertise in Web programming combined with his previous work experience has helped him gain hands on experience on cutting-edge technologies involving Web 2.0, Ajax programming, SOAP, RESTful Architecture, OSN API interface, Spatio-Temporal Database Design.

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Software Expertise

• Languages: Java/J2EE, C#, C, C++, Visual Basic, VB.Net.
• RDBMS: MS SQL Server-2000, SQL Server 7.0, MySQL, DB2, PostgreSQL, Oracle 8i Edition (SQL).
• Platforms: MS-DOS, Windows (9x, XP, 2K, NT 4.0, 2003, Vista), Windows Mobile, Linux, Mac OS X.
• Web Technology: Spring Framework, JSP, Velocity, Maven, Ajax, Dojo, jQuery, i-widget, IBM Mashup Center, ASP.NET, ADO.NET, ASP 3.0, COM+, HTML, XML, XML Web Service, XSD, Reporting Services, VB Script, Java Script, DHTML, PHP.
• Tools: CVS, R package, Weka, JIRA, GnuPlot, Matlab, Pajek, Eclipse Galileo, Easy Eclipse (Java Server), Visual Studio.Net, Visual Interdev, FrontPage 2003, Flash MX, Photoshop 6.0, Dreamweaver MX, PageMaker, Swish, SourceSafe.

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Ph.D Research

• Project Social Network Enabled Flu Trends (SNEFT) is a framework developed with the research objective of extracting and utilizing information from keyword-frequency data obtained from Online Social Networks (OSNs) such as Facebook, MySpace and Twitter, in order to provide timely prediction of the emergence and spread of an influenza epidemic.
Download : Thesis (pdf) | Poster (pdf)

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Education

• Ph.D. in Computer Science, University of Massachusetts Lowell, Lowell, MA, USA [Sept 2012]
• Master of Science, Computer Science, University of Massachusetts Lowell, Lowell, MA, USA [Dec 2008]
• Bachelor of Engineering, Information Technology, University of Mumbai, Maharashtra, India [2004]

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Research Publications

Online Social Network Flu Trend Tracker - A Novel Sensory Approach to Predict Flu Trends
Harshavardhan Achrekar, Avinash Gandhe, Ross Lazarus, Ssu-Hsin Yu, Benyuan Liu
Lecture Notes series - "Communications in Computer and Information Science" publisher Springer-Verlag.
Download : Published Chapter (pdf)

Twitter improves Seasonal Influenza Prediction (Best Student Paper Award)
Harshavardhan Achrekar, Avinash Gandhe, Ross Lazarus, Ssu-Hsin Yu, Benyuan Liu
Fifth Annual International Conference on Health Informatics, Portugal, February 2012.
Download : Presentation (pdf) |Published Paper (pdf)

A Spatio-Temporal Approach to the Discovery of Online Social Trends
Harshavardhan Achrekar, Zheng Fang, Benyuan Liu, You Li, Cindy Chen, Jie Wang
Fifth Annual International Conference on Combinatorial Optimization and Applications (COCOA), August 2011.
Download : Published Paper (pdf)

Predicting Flu Trends using Twitter data
Harshavardhan Achrekar, Avinash Gandhe, Ross Lazarus, Ssu-Hsin Yu, Benyuan Liu
First International Workshop on Cyber-Physical Networking Systems (CPNS) 2011, IEEE Infocom, April 2011.
Download : Presentation (ppt / pdf) | Published Paper (pdf)

Vision: Towards Real Time Epidemic Vigilance through Online Social Networks
Lingji Chen, Harshavardhan Achrekar, Benyuan Liu, Ross Lazarus
First ACM Workshop on Mobile Cloud Computing & Services: Social Networks and Beyond (MCS), ACM MobiSys, June 2010.
Download : Presentation (ppt / pdf) | Published Paper (pdf)

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Professional Experience

• Java/J2EE Application Developer Intern, Citrix Online , Jersey City, NJ, USA. [May 2012 - Aug 2012]
Developed and deployed "First Call Resolution" - Maven based Java/J2EE application on Apache Tomcat Server using Spring Framework 3.0 to help the Global Customer Support team resolve clients, call related issues. Key features are
• MVC design pattern, Java Beans, Servlets, DAO data abstraction pattern, Dynamic data source selection.
• Agile project methodology with CVS for software configuration management and version control, JIRA for bug and issue tracking, Hudson to build rpm and ec-Services for package deployment.
• Extensively used the LOG4j to log regular Debug and Exception statements and developed JUnit test cases.
• Software Application Developer Intern, IBM Inc.-Lexington, MA, USA. [Jun 2008 - Dec 2008]
Developed and deployed 'PLM Mashups' a PHP based web application using Zend Framework on the IBM Websphere portal which drops i-widgets onto its canvass and connects them to data sources to pull software product pricing data out of feeds which are hosted within the IBM Mashup Center/Hub. Technologies relevant to Web 2.0 such as Ajax, Mashups, i-widgets, gadgets, Dojo, crawling/scrapping, RSS feed and Atom were used.
• Research Assistant, Environmental Health and Safety, University of Massachusetts - Lowell. [Jun 2007 - May 2008]
Developed and maintained an ASP.Net web-based application 'EmsWebware' that enabled any institution, organization or agency the ability to develop and manage an Environmental Management System (EMS) or ISO 14001 program.
• Research Assistant, Commercial Ventures and Intellectual Properties, University of Massachusetts - Lowell. [Jan 2007 - May 2007]
Developed and maintained an ASP.Net web-based application 'CVIP Portal' that kept track of all patent and research information regarding any technology commercialization.
• Student Employee, UMass Lowell Information Technology, University of Massachusetts - Lowell. [Sept 2006 - Dec 2007]
Developed a standalone desktop solution 'CuteUploadUML' which uploads/downloads huge files to/from the server in the form of a drop box.
• Executive (Project Application - Information Systems), Bharat Petroleum Corporation Limited (BPCL - Fortune 500 Company) [Jul 2004 - Jul 2006]
Responsibilities included project management, administration of servers and maintenance of client - server applications. Actively involved in analyzing, designing, developing, testing and deploying web applications.
Main applications developed:
• Bharat Petroleum Retail Outlet Automation Project (2005-2006)
Under the guidance of Microsoft Evangelists, an inhouse application was developed for capturing the sales data from BPCL's retail outlet. OLAP cubes were created using Analysis Services and reports were generated using Reporting Server to notify territory managers.
• BP-Legal Package and Asset Declaration Package (2004-2005)
Both packages were developed in .Net and SQL 2000 making use of OOP's concepts, stored procedures, COM+ components and web services.

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Academic Projects

• Real-Time Text Classification Software using WEKA [Sept 2011 - Dec 2011]: Machine Learning tool build in Java using WEKA library to classify using SVM unsupervised data, based on trained dataset using certain accuracy.
• Graph Compression using Triad 300 (GC300)[Sept 2010 - Dec 2010]:
GC300 - Graph compression technique for massive real world graphs which obey power law and small world properties.
• Scatter Plot - Graphing tool[Jan 2010 - May 2010]
Developed a Scatter Plot tool in C#.Net (Instruction Manual and Interface design) and performed analysis on two Dataset(Cars dataset and Twitter dataset) followed by Binning , Normalization and Imputation performed on data.
• Social Network Enabled Flu Trends - Data Visualization Perspective [Jan 2010 - May 2010]
Implemented the timeline based Flu distribution on USA map, Tabular Heat-map, network layout based visualization for Flu network using R package, Weka, Graphview and established social network parameters like diameter, degree distribution, betweenness, closeness, assortativity .,etc.
• Predicting protein interactions from amino acid sequence[Jan 2009 - May 2009]
Investigate the use of machine learning classifiers such as Decision Tree, Bagging, Boosting, SVM, and Random Forest on protein interaction data.
• K-Mean Clustering Algorithm [Jan 2008 - May 2008]
Implemented K-Mean clustering algorithm using C++ and used OpenGL graphics Library to present the clustered data.
• LAN Setup [Jan 2008 - May 2008]
Interconnecting Cisco Network Devices for testing IOS commands, ARP, ICMP, RIP, OSPF, BGB protocols.
• Car Manufacturing Database [Sept 2007 - Dec 2007]
Designed and implemented an E-R diagram and queried the ORACLE 9i database to retrieve required information.
• XINU Operating System [Jan 2007 - May 2007]
Designed a model that implemented the operating system concepts like process creation, memory allocation, scheduling and mutual exclusion.
• UML Video Streaming Server [Jan 2007 - May 2007]
A client server implementation in JAVA that streamed RTP video packets from the university department server to multiple clients.
• Socket Programming [Sept 2006 - Dec 2006]
Implemented an HTTP Client-Server program in C.
• Mutual Exclusion Problem [Sept 2006 - Dec 2006]
Implemented a producer consumer model by use of semaphores, mutex and thread processes on single processors as well as over a distributed operating system environment.
• Dijkstra's shortest path algorithm [Sept 2006 - Dec 2006]
Implemented in C a program for calculating shortest path for network packets travelling from source to destination.
• Defense against Distributed Denial of Service Attacks (DDOS) [July 2003 - May 2004]
Implemented an intelligent modular software router to collect and maintain statistical data which helped in preventing DDOS attack.
• Crop Cultivation Feasibility using Genetic Algorithms (GAs) [2003]
Developed a software which calculated the effect of environmental factors on the growth and development of plants and predicted the characteristics of the plant after successive generations using Genetic Algorithms.

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Awards and Certifications

• Outstanding Graduate Student Award at University of Massachusetts Lowell - 2012
• 1st Prize at Students Forum for Electronics for technical paper - 'Auto Updating Knowledge Based Intrusion Detection System' - 2004.
• Recipient of the J.R.D. TATA Scholarship 2001-2002.
• Completed training on 'Interconnecting Cisco Network Devices' (640-801) - Karrox technologies labs on TCP /IP, DNS, ARP/RARP, Routing Protocols, Router Configurations etc.
• Training on 3 levels of Administration - System, Network and Enterprise in Red Hat Linux Fedora.
• Diploma in Visual Basic 6 and Oracle 8 with First Class from Indo German Educational Fund.
• Dual Certification in Graphics and Web from Academy of Digital Arts & Communications.
• 1st Prize winner at the SFE Hardware Contest for 'Manually/Computer Controlled Operated Robots'.

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Co-Curricular Activities

• UMass-Lowell Ping Pong Champion 2011 - represented University at National Collegiate Table Tennis Competition.
• Conducted a Visual Basic workshop for 260 student participants from engineering college.
• Designed Websites for
  • 'Strategym' - Technical Festival of Jamnalal Bajaj Institute of Management Studies.
  • The Entrepreneur Cell - An Entrepreneurship Development Programme at IIT Bombay.
  • 'iMagine 2003' - CSI National Level Web Designing Contest.

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Positions Held

• Senator of Indian Student's Association [ISA] at University of Massachusetts-Lowell. [2007-08]
• Student Placement Coordinator of Vivekanand College of Engineering [VESIT], India. [2003-2004].

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