Torsten Suel
Associate Professor
Computer and Information Science
Polytechnic University

I am a faculty member in the Department of Computer and Information Science at Polytechnic University in Brooklyn, NY. I received a Diplom degree from the Technical University of Braunschweig in Germany, and a Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin. Before joining Polytechnic University in the Fall of 1998, I held postdoctoral positions at the NEC Research Institute and Bell Labs.


COURSE OFFERING IN FALL 2007: CS6913 - WEB SEARCH ENGINES     course description (DOC)


RESEARCH:

My main research areas are web search technology, algorithms, databases, and distributed computation. I currently spend most of my time working with my graduate and undergraduate students in the Web Exploration and Search Technology Lab, who are building web search engines and other search tools and experimenting with new techniques and architectures. In addition, I still do some work in the algorithms and database areas, and I am also interested in peer-to-peer systems, data compression, networking, and distributed systems. For more information, visit the homepage of my research group or look at my complete list of papers.

Student Research Opportunities: I usually have a few research topics available for highly motivated students who want to do research under my supervision, e.g., as part of a senior project or MS thesis. But please read this first before contacting me about research opportunities.


TEACHING:

I will be teaching CS308/CS6083 (Introduction to Database Systems) and CS6913 (Web Search Engines) in the Fall 2007 semester. Here are some of the courses I have taught at Poly in recent years:


CURRENT PHD STUDENTS:
PHD GRADUATES:
  • Yen-Yu Chen "Geographic Search Engines", 2006. (Employment: Yahoo)
  • Utku Irmak "Algorithms for Information Extraction and Dissemination on the World-Wide Web", 2006. (Employment: Yahoo)
  • Xiaohui Long "Efficient Query Processing in Large Web Search Engines", 2006. (Employment: MSN Search)


RECENT PAPERS:

  • Cleaning Search Results using Term Distance Features. With J. Attenberg. 4th Workshop on Adversarial Information Retrieval on the Web (in conjunction with WWW), April 2008. PDF

  • Geographic Web Usage Estimation by Monitoring DNS Caches. With H. Akcan and H. Broennimann. 1st International Workshop on Location and the Web (in conjunction with WWW), April 2008. PDF

  • Analysis of Geographic Queries in a Search Engine Log. With Q. Gan, J. Attenberg, and A. Markowetz. 1st International Workshop on Location and the Web (in conjunction with WWW), April 2008. PDF

  • Using Graphics Processors for High-Performance IR Query Processing. With S. Ding, J. He, and H. Yan. 17th International World Wide Web Conference (WWW), Poster Session, April 2008. PDF

  • Performance of Compressed Inverted List Caching in Search Engines. With J. Zhang and X.Long. 17th International World Wide Web Conference (WWW), April 2008. PDF

  • Algorithms for Low-Latency Remote File Synchronization. With H. Yan and U. Irmak. IEEE Infocom Conference, April 2008. PDF

  • Improving Web Spam Classifiers Using Link Structure. With Q. Gan. 3rd Workshop on Adversarial Information Retrieval on the Web (held in conjunction with WWW), May 2007. PDF

  • Efficient Search in Large Textual Collections with Redundancy. With J. Zhang. 16th International World Wide Web Conference (WWW), May 2007. PDF

  • Optimized Inverted List Assignment in Distributed Search Engine Architectures. With J. Zhang. 21st IEEE International Parallel & Distributed Processing Symposium (IPDPS'07), March 2007. PDF

  • Efficient Query Subscription Processing for Prospective Search Engines. With U. Irmak, S. Mihaylov, S. Ganguly, and R. Izmailov. USENIX Annual Technical Conference, May 2006. PDF

  • Efficient Query Processing in Geographic Web Search Engines. With Y. Chen and A. Markowetz. ACM Intern. Conference on Management of Data (SIGMOD), June 2006. PDF

  • Approximate Maximum Weighted Branchings. With A. Bagchi and A. Bhargava. Information Processing Letters, accepted for publication, February 2006. PDF (preliminary version)

  • Interactive Wrapper Generation with Minimal User Effort. With U. Irmak. 15th International World Wide Web Conference (WWW), May 2006. PDF

  • Efficient Query Evaluation on Large Textual Collections in a Peer-to-Peer Environment. With J. Zhang. 5th IEEE International Conference on Peer-to-Peer Computing, August 2005. PDF

  • Design and Implementation of a Geographic Search Engine. With A. Markowetz, Y. Chen, X. Long, and B. Seeger. 8th International Workshop on the Web and Databases (WebDB), June 2005. PDF (Note: an extended version is available as Technical Report TR-CIS-2005-03, Polytechnic University, February 2005. PDF)

  • Hierarchical Substring Caching for Efficient Content Distribution to Low-Bandwidth Clients. With U. Irmak. 14th International World Wide Web Conference (WWW), May 2005. PDF

  • Three-Level Caching for Efficient Query Processing in Large Web Search Engines. With X. Long. 14th International World Wide Web Conference (WWW), May 2005. PDF

  • Improved Single-Round Protocols for Remote File Synchronization. With U. Irmak and S. Mihaylov. IEEE Infocom Conference, March 2005. PDF (Note: an earlier version with some of the results appeared at the 4th New York Metro Area Networking Workshop (NYMAN), September 2004.)

  • Optimal Peer Selection for P2P Downloading and Streaming. With M. Adler, R. Kumar, K. Ross, D. Rubenstein, and D. Yao. IEEE Infocom Conference, March 2005. PDF

  • The Perron-Frobenius Theorem and Some of its Applications. With U. Pillai and S. Cha. IEEE Signal Processing Magazine 2, 2005, pp. 62-75.

  • Approximation Algorithms for Array Partitioning Problems. With S. Muthukrishnan. Journal of Algorithms 54, 2005, pp. 85-104. PDF

  • Local Methods for Estimating PageRank Values. With Y. Chen and Q. Gan. 13th Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM), November 2004. PDF (Note: an earlier version appeared at the 3rd Workshop on Web Dynamics in conjunction with WWW 2004.)

  • Compressing File Collections with a TSP-Based Approach. With D. Trendafilov and N. Memon. Technical Report TR-CIS-2004-02, Polytechnic University, April 2004. PDF

  • Improved File Synchronization Techniques for Maintaining Large Replicated Collections over Slow Networks. With P. Noel and D. Trendafilov. IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE), March 2004. PDF (Talk: PPT PDF, 6 per page)

  • Server-Friendly Delta Compression for Efficient Web Access. With A. Savant. Eighth International Workshop on Web Content Caching and Distribution (WCW), September 2003. PDF (Talk: PPT PDF, 6 per page)

  • Optimized Query Execution in Large Search Engines with Global Page Ordering. With X. Long. International Conference on Very Large Data Bases (VLDB), September 2003. PDF (Talk: PPT PDF, 6 per page)

  • ODISSEA: A Peer-to-Peer Architecture for Scalable Web Search and Information Retrieval. With C. Mathur, J. Wu, J. Zhang, A. Delis, M. Kharrazi, X Long, and K. Shanmugasundaram. 6th International Workshop on the Web and Databases (WebDB), June 2003. PDF (Talk: PPT PDF, 6 per page)
    Technical Report (23 pages): PDF
    WWW 2003 Poster Version (2 pages): PDF

  • On the Scalability of an Image Transcoding Proxy Server. With A. Savant and N. Memon. International Conference on Image Processing, September 2003. PDF

  • Inferring Tree Topologies Using Flow Tests. With S. Muthukrishnan and R. Vingralek. SIAM Symposium on Discrete Algorithms (SODA), January 2003 (short paper). PDF

  • Cluster-Based Delta Compression of Collections of Files. With Z. Ouyang, N. Memon, and D. Trendafilov. International Conference on Web Information Systems Engineering (WISE), December 2002. PDF (Talk: PPT PDF, 6 per page)

  • I/O-Efficient Techniques for Computing Pagerank. With Y. Chen and Q. Gan. ACM Conference on Information and Knowledge Engineering (CIKM), November 2002. PDF

  • An Efficient Distributed Algorithm for Constructing Small Dominating Sets. With L. Jia and R. Rajaraman. Distributed Computing 14, 2002, pp. 193-205. (Note: an earlier version appeared at the 20th ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing (PODC), August 2001. PDF)

  • zdelta: An Efficient Delta Compression Tool. With D. Trendafilov and N. Memon. Technical Report TR-CIS-2002-02, Polytechnic University, June 2002. PDF

  • Algorithms for Delta Compression and Remote File Synchronization With N. Memon. Invited chapter in Handbook of Lossless Compression. Edited by K. Sayood, Academic Press, August 2002. PDF (preliminary version)

  • Design and Implementation of a High-Performance Distributed Web Crawler. With V. Shkapenyuk. IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE), February 2002. Postscript PDF (Talk: PPT PDF, 6 per page)


CONTACT INFORMATION:

Office: LC 231 (CATT/Library)
Phone: (718) 260 3354
Fax: (718) 260 3609
Email: suel (at) poly.edu
US Mail: CIS Department
Polytechnic Univ.
6 MetroTech Center
Brooklyn, NY 11201