K Vikram : Curriculum Vitae
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Personal Details

Academic Background

Schooling

Undergraduate Studies

    Current CPI (Cumulative Performance Index)
Overall:         9.8 (out of a maximum of 10.0)       (placed 3rd in a batch of around 43)
Major:           9.9 (out of a maximum of 10.0)       (placed 1st in a batch of around 43)
            ( A = 10.0, B = 8.0, C = 6.0, D = 4.0, F = 2.0 )

    Professional Courses completed

    Professional Courses taken in the current semester (To be completed by May 2004)

    Other Important Courses completed

    Standardized Test Scores

Academic Achievements

• Been among the top 5 students of my batch throughout my academic career
• Rank holder of various state and national level scholarship tests conducted by Universal Trust-Trivandrum and Association of Mathematics Teachers of India
• Stood 18^th in the All India IIT Joint Entrance Examination 2000 in which around 120000 students appear every year
• Stood 14^th in the All India Roorkee Entrance Examination in 2000 which around 50000 students appear each year
• Awarded the notional prize for academic excellence in the terms 2000-2001 and 2002-2003 by the Senate Scholarships and Prizes Committee, IIT Kanpur
• Awarded the Telco Silver Jubilee Scholarship for two consecutive years, 2001 and 2002

K. Vikram, Kumar Avijit, Sanjeev Kumar Aggarwal. olyMPIx: A Tool for Automatic Program Parallelization using MPI on Computational Grids. Submitted to the 7th International Conference on High Performance Computing and Grid in Asia Pacific Region, Japan, July 2004.

Jurgen Stuber, K. Vikram. CTerms: Experiences with an Implementation of Context Matching. (System Description). Submitted to the 15th International Conference on Rewriting Techniques and Applications, Aachen, Germany,  June 2004.

K. Vikram. Scout - An improved tool for cracking WEP keys. In Proceedings of IIT Kanpur Hackers' Workshop 2004, February 2004 (to appear)
Download: Postscript

Manav Ratan Mital, K Vikram, Abhinav Gupta, and Dheeraj Sanghi. Ulysses - A new approach to maintaining connectivity. In Proceedings of International Conference on Internet Technologies - Prospects and Challenges 2003, May 2003.
Download: Postscript

P. Goyal, Manav R. Mital, A. Mukerjee, Achla M. Raina, D. Sharma, P. Shukla, and K Vikram. Saarthaka - A Bilingual Parser for Hindi, English and code-switching structures. In Proceedings of the 11th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, April 12-17, 2003 (available on CD-ROM).
Download: PDF

D. Sharma, K Vikram, Manav R. Mital, A. Mukerjee, and A. M. Raina. Saarthaka - Word Sense Disambiguation using Head-Subcat Relationship in HPSG and Ontological Classes. Sasikumar M, Jayprasad Hegde and Kavitha M, editors, in Artificial Intelligence: Theory and Practice, Proceedings of the International Conference KBCS-2002, pages 397-388, December 2002.
Download: Postscript
(This paper was presented by me at the conference)

D. Sharma, K Vikram, Manav R. Mital, A. Mukerjee, and A. M. Raina. Saarthaka - A Generalized HPSG Parser for English and Hindi. Rajeev Sangal and S. M. Bendre, editors, in Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing, Proceedings of the International Conference on Natural Language Processing ICON-2002, pages 89-97, December 2002.
Download: Postscript
(This paper was presented by me at the conference)

D. Sharma, K Vikram, Manav R. Mital, A. Mukerjee, and Achla M. Raina. Saarthaka - An Integrated Discourse Semantic Model for Bilingual Corpora. In Proceedings of International Conference on Unified Knowledge and Language 2002 (available on CD-ROM), 25th-27th November 2002
Download: Postscript

Projects / Research Work (in reverse chronological order)

A Novel Extension to the SELinux Policy Framework (ongoing*)
August,2003 - April,2004* (Team of 2)
Supervisors: Dr. Deepak Gupta, Associate Professor and Dr. Dheeraj Sanghi, Professor, Computer Science and Engineering, IIT Kanpur
As our undergraduate thesis, we have proposed an extension to the Security Enhanced Linux (SELinux) framework which would make it easier to enhance their policy language. This extension is in the form of an interface that we have built into SELinux. Loadable modules could then be attached to this system that would use this interface to add particular constructs to the policy language. The motivation to add these language constructs is to enable an easy and natural expression of high level security policies. We have implemented the infrastructure necessary for this and will be soon writing certain modules for high level security policies such as the MLS policy and the Biba Integrity policy. These modules are currently written in C, but ultimately they would be generated from a high level specification language that we are in the process of designing.
Download     Mid-Term Report: Postscript

Techniques for automatic parallelization of sequential programs for the Grid
August - December, 2003 (Team of 2)
Supervisor: Dr. S. K. Aggarwal, Professor, Computer Science and Engineering, IIT Kanpur
In a special independent study course, we are studying various techniques for automatic parallelization of sequential programs and adapting them for the Grid. We have extended the SUIF (Stanford University Intermediate Format) parallelizer for the purpose and have come up with a tool to parallelize sequential C programs, by inserting calls to the MPI library, so that they can run on a grid.

Survey of Adaptive Software: State of the Art and Research Issues
August-November, 2003 (Team of 2)
Supervisor: Dr. S. K. Aggarwal, Professor, Computer Science and Engineering, IIT Kanpur
The survey covers the meaning and scope of the term Adaptive used in different contexts and different techniques that have been proposed for Adaptive Programming. We essentially investigate the evolution of this field over the years and how Web Components are being used for the purpose.
Download     Survey Report: Postscript

A distributed algorithm for fault-tolerant simultaneous reception/transmission between nodes in an 802.11 mesh network
August - November, 2003 (Team of 3)
Supervisor: Dr. Bhaskaran Raman, Assistant Professor, Computer Science and Engineering, IIT Kanpur
This is part of a larger effort, the Digital Gangetic Plains project and was a major component of a graduate level course on Advanced Computer Networks. With the motivation of increasing the throughput of a network of point to point wireless links, we have proposed changes to the MAC layer of the 802.11 protocol. These changes now make it possible for a node to simultaneously transmit(receive) to(from) two of its neighbors on the same channel. To achieve this, we designed an algorithm to maintain a synchronization of the transmissions between the nodes and have also proved its correctness. We are working on writing up these results for publication.

Implementation of Context Matching
May-July, 2003 (Single)
Supervisors: Dr. Jurgen Stuber, Postdoctoral Researcher and Dr. Claude Kirchner, Principal Investigator, Protheo Group, LORIA, INRIA Nancy, France
Context Matching extends standard first-order matching of terms (in logic) by allowing variables on the left hand side which stand for contexts in addition to variables that stand for terms. Contexts are terms with a hole, analogous to first order functions in Lambda Calculus. It has applications in querying, describing operations over terms in logical calculii, term rewriting and contraint solving. As a summer intern, I was involved in extending and implementing two existing algorithms for Context Matching. An important contribution was the conception of a novel data structure, which we called the semi-solved form, to represent solutions to such problems, which reduced the time complexity of one of the algorithms. We have submitted this work in the Fifteenth International Conference on Rewriting Techniques and Applications to be held at Aachen in June 2004.
Download     Source Code   Preliminary Report: Postscript (gzipped)  Theoretical Paper: Postscript (gzipped)

Cracking the WEP Protocol
January-April, 2003 (Single)
Supervisors: Dr. Deepak Gupta, Associate Professor and Dr. Dheeraj Sanghi, Professor, Computer Science and Engineering, IIT Kanpur
WEP, the security layer of the IEEE 802.11 LLC Protocol, has certain shortcomings which have been pointed out in the literature. Using these weaknesses, I dirtied my hands in implementing and demonstrating a tool which could crack both the 5-byte and the 13-byte secret key with a higher probability of success than that of existing tools.
Download     Report: Postscript (gzipped)

Simulator for nodes on a wireless network
May, 2003 (Team of 2)
Supervisor: Dr. Pravin Bhagwat, Visiting Professor, Computer Science and  Engineering, IIT Kanpur
Modeling the arrival of packets as a Poisson distribution with the rate given as a parameter, we designed and implemented a simulator for analyzing a network with nodes sending packets at different rates. The objective of the analysis was to discover the particular combinations of rate values at different nodes that would lead the system to a stable state. We did the analysis on a system of two nodes with varying transmission rates at each node and showed that the results were as predicted by theory.

Design and Development of a Compiler for a subset of the ADA-83 language
January-April, 2003 (Team of 4)
Supervisor: Dr. S. K. Aggarwal, Professor, Computer Science and Engineering, IIT Kanpur
As part of the course CS335: Compiler Design, I was involved in crafting a compiler that could handle the major programming constructs of the Ada 83 language. We used the Scale Compiler back-end (from University of Massachusetts Amherst) with which we were able to successfully integrate our front-end syntactic and semantic analyser to emit assembly code for various architectures like Sparc, MIPS and Alpha.

A Network File-sharing System (two designs)
August and October, 2002 (Team of 3)
Supervisor: Dr. Dheeraj Sanghi, Professor, Computer Science and Engineering, IIT Kanpur
This was part of the course requirement of CS425: Computer Networks. Two different techniques of filesharing on today's TCP/IP networks were experimented. One implementation required a central server which was crucial to its operation and the other did not require such a central server. The latter was similar in design to Gnutella with some indigenous design enhancements that had better fault-tolerance capabilities. More details can be found in our conference paper published in ITPC 2003.

Nachos
August-November, 2002 (Team of 3)
Supervisor: Dr. Deepak Gupta, Associate Professor, Computer Science and Engineering, IIT Kanpur
Nachos is an instructional Operating System Simulation that runs as a normal UNIX process. As part of the course of CS330: Operating Systems, the task was to build upon a barebones version of Nachos, certain essential features such as synchronization, CPU scheduling, console drivers, filesystem interface, etc.

Term Paper on Godel's Incompleteness Theorem
November, 2002 (Single)
Supervisor: Dr. Anil Seth, Associate Professor, Computer Science and Engineering, IIT Kanpur
As part of the course CS350: Principles of Programming Languages, I wrote a short paper on the proof and implications of Godel's Incompleteness Theorem.

A sniffer on Linux for the IEEE 802.11b protocol
May-July, 2002 (Team of 4)
Supervisor: Dr. Pravin Bhagwat, Visiting Professor, Computer Science and Engineering, IIT Kanpur
The work was part of the Digital Gangetic Plains project at IIT Kanpur. The outdoor wireless network built using off-the-shelf wireless products had been in the experimental phase and it had to be extensively tested for performance, etc. For this purpose, a sniffer was needed and one that extracted all the packet information did not exist for the Linux platform. Our work was to build one such sniffer. This involved hacking into the driver code and making appropriate changes so that the required information could be fetched from the card. We were also able to port the sniffer and the driver with the changes, onto a Linux Box with a StrongArm Processor Architecture. On a parallel thread, the access point and bridging capabilities of the D-Link Wireless card was also researched. This helped us to use these cards as fully functional Access Points mainly for testing purposes.

A generalized HPSG parser with Word Sense Disambiguation
May-July, 2002 (Team of 3)
Supervisors: Dr. Amitabha Mukerjee, Professor, Computer Science and Engineering and Dr. A M Raina, Associate Professor, Humanities Department, IIT Kanpur
The idea was to build a parser program that could parse sentences both in English and Hindi using different lexicons. A subset of features of the HPSG formalism were used. The challenge was to isolate just the required language specific details and encode them into the lexicon. Word sense disambiguation was done using the concept of ontology using the ontological classes from WordNet.The disambiguation was performed on sentences in HPSG parse format and the semantic relations between various phrases was utilized in narrowing down on the word sense using probabilities assigned to different possible combinations. More details could be found in our conference papers (published in ICON 2002 and KBCS 2002) which elucidate the results
of these efforts.

An intelligent player for the game of Chinese Checkers
March-April, 2002 (Team of 3)
Supervisor: Dr. Manindra Agrawal, Professor, Computer Science and Engineering, IIT Kanpur
This was done as part of the course of CS245: Algorithms. Our aim was to build a computer player for the standard game of Chinese Checkers. In the tournament held between all the (about 20) players made by our batch, our player reached till the quarter final stage.

Discourse Comprehension and Question Answering
December, 2001 - April, 2002 (Team of 3)
Supervisors: Dr. Amitabha Mukerjee, Professor, Computer Science and Engineering and Dr. A M Raina, Associate Professor, Humanities Department, IIT Kanpur
This was a major part of the course of CS665: Artificial Intelligence and in this, we designed and implemented a complete system to understand a discourse and then answer questions based on it. The front end was an HPSG parser, whose parsed output was converted into a first order predicate structure using certain heuristics. The noun entities in the discourse were then identified and a structure was built by modeling the relations between the entities as a relational model, following which extensive spatial analysis was applied to this representation. An apriori knowledge base was maintained containing axiomatic facts and certain rules of inference. This was used in adding to the discourse structure and making inferences. These were then used in answering questions of a limited type that were input in natural language format. This work was published in ICUKL 2002.

A GWBASIC IDE written in Java
October-November, 2001 (Team of 3)
Supervisor:  Dr. R K Ghosh, Professor, Computer Science and Engineering, IIT Kanpur
This was in partial fulfillment of CS210: Data Structures and Algorithms. We designed and implemented an interpreter for a large subset of the GWBASIC language. Besides, we also implemented a front end editor which was linked to the interpreter and had features such as syntax highlighting.
Our project was declared the Best Project of our batch and was awarded the highest grade.

Development of an information system to handle general information about employees
June - July, 2001 (Single)
Supervisor: Mr. K. K. Ghosh, General Manager, TTL, Tata Engineering, Jamshedpur
The task was to set up a central server on the network that would maintain information of all employees and provide a web interface to make updates in this information base. Java Servlets on a Tomcat Server, Oracle database, JDBC, SQL and HTML were the primary technologies used.

Other Major Programming Assignments

Design and Implementation of a Railway Reservation System using RPC
November, 2002
Supervisor: Dr. Dheeraj Sanghi, Professor, Computer Science and Engineering, IIT Kanpur
This was done as a programming assignment in the course CS425: Computer Networks.

Implementation of a Binary Calculator program
October, 2002 (Single)
Supervisor: Dr. S. K. Aggarwal, Professor, Computer Science and Engineering, IIT Kanpur
As an assignment in the course CS355: Programming Tools and Techniques, the objective was to mimic the behaviour of the standard binary calculator program on Linux, particularily for the important constructs.

Hobbies/Extra-Curricular Activities

• Won the ``Robot with the Best Aesthetics" prize in Robo-Topplers, a robot building contest in Techkriti-2001
• Participated in various Institute level English Literary Activities like Debates, Jam, Extempore and Dumb Charades and won prizes in most of them
• Did a 1 year course on Yoga in 2000-01
  
• A Student Guide of the IIT Kanpur Couselling Service
• An occasional swimmer
• Active member of the Astronomy Club
• Frequent reader of novels of various genres, with special interest in Science Fiction
• I enjoy traveling and have toured various places in India and even abroad in France, Germany and Switzerland.
  

Last updated on:
14th February 2004