AI Research Interests

• Bayesian Inference with an unknown number of objects and identity uncertainty. Currently applying this to Seismic event detection. My recent poster presentations at ISS'09 Modeling [PPT] [PDF] and Inference [PPT] [PDF].
• Automatic Inference in probabilistic programming languages. Working on an embedding of the BLOG language in Python -- I call it PyBLOG. Recent poster in Probabilistic Programming Workshop in NIPS '08 -- [PPT]

Systems Research

• [PDF] Oracle Streams: a High Performance Implementation for Near Real Time Asynchronous Replication (with Lik Wong, Lei Gao, Thuvan Hoang, and Jingwei Wu). ICDE '09
• [PDF] [PPT] Oracle Streams for Near Real Time Asynchronous Replication. DIDDR workshop of VLDB '05
• [PDF] [PPT] Thread Scheduling for Multiprogrammed Multiprocessors. (with Robert D. Blumofe and C. Greg Plaxton) Theory of Comput. Syst. 2001 and SPAA 1998

Class Projects

• Experiments in Binning Image statistics [Presentation] [PS] [PDF]
• Shallow Semantics with Shallow Syntax [Presentation] [ PS] [PDF]
• Juari : Opponent Modelling & Action Selection in Poker [Presentation] [TXT]
• Towards understanding and fixing the leaking pipeline of Computer Science (Gender differences in CS education). [PDF]

Reading Lists

• NLP reading list on question answering

Patents

• Incremental refresh of materialized views for many-to-many relationships (2001)
• Method of applying changes to a standby database system (2002)
• On-demand multi-version data dictionary to support distributed applications (2003)
• Automatic resizing of shared memory for messaging (2005)
• Efficient replication of XML data in a relational database management system (2006)
• Method of optimizing propagation of non-persistent messages from a source database management system to a destination database management system (2006)
• Replicating data between heterogeneous data systems (2006)
• Using XML for flexible replication of complex types (2006)
• Management of a distributed database (2006)
• Replicating and sharing data between heterogeneous data systems (2007)
• Automatic error correction for replication and instantaneous instantiation (2007)
• Combining capture and apply in a distributed information sharing system (2007)
• Reconfiguring propagation streams in distributed information sharing (2007)
• Checkpoint-free in log mining for distributed information sharing (2007)
• Configuring or reconfiguring a multi-master information sharing environment (2007)
• High performant row-level data manipulation using a data layer interface (2007)

About Me

I graduated from IIT Kanpur in 1996 and then from UT Austin in 1998. Since then I have been working in Oracle in the database replication group. Since 2006 I have also been studying in UC Berkeley.

I'm married to Geeta Arora, and I have two daughters -- Riya and Rayna.

I like painting, wine-making, jam-making, playing chess, reading (on history and politics), hiking, camping, etc.

Contact

• Berkeley: nimar at cs dot berkeley dot edu
• Oracle : nimar dot arora at oracle dot com
• Personal : nimar underscore arora at yahoo dot com