Jitu

The Ferris State University is located in Big Rapids, Michigan, USA. With around 12,000 students more people were studying there than people were living in Big Rapids itself (10,000 to 11,000 citizens). Big Rapids is a very small town and it can be easily explored by foot. It is around one hour by car in the north of Grand Rapids in the center of Michigan. Nearby the university all kind of grocery stores like Walmart and a lot of fast food restaurants are located providing anything you might need. Especially the fishes in Walmart were a fast seller, because it was the only animal, which was allowed to be kept in the halls. So students tried to figure out, how long a goldfish can survive, if there are also some piranhas swimming in the same fish tank (and it was longer than expected).

On the campus were many halls, where the students shared 2 or 4 bed appartments. For married couples were special appartments or even houses available. So it was not very far to go to class or to join any party going on in the other halls. Also on campus were different dining halls each with a special kind of food. Typical American food was served in “The Rock”, where I paid once and then was allowed to eat as much as I could.
The biggest building (well, it seemed like this) was the library called FLITE (Ferris Library for Information, Technology, and Education). Fully airconditioned it contained just a few books (compared to the available space within the library). All needed books had been digitalized and were available through one of the terminals.

In the free time the students could do a lot of sports and activities. There were even courses in climbing and swimming, which was done at the climbing wall or in swimming pool located in the recreation center on campus. But also basketball, tennis, squash, and ice skating were available for free or for a small fee in one of the university’s owned buildings.

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First of all, I did not want to go to India, I never had the idea to go there. When I started to gather information about my next stay abroad, I wanted to go to Malaysia. Malaysia? Why Malaysia? Well, it’s all about girls, isn’t it? But that was not the only reason: Before that time I have never been to an Asian country. The German definition of an Asian country excludes countries like India. So when we talk about Asia, it is clear that we mean countries like China, Japan, or Korea.

So I went to the Office of International Affairs of my university, which helped me a lot during my first stay in the US, and I explained my wishes to them. Unfortunately they had no contract university in Malaysia. A contract university would have made the things a lot easier and most of the times it is based on an exchange of resources and also students. They suggested me (because of my wishes to visit an Asian country) to gather informations about the IIT in India and I got in contact with some research groups developing software for speech recognition. I am not really interested in that field and I discussed my poor experiences with my colleagues while the lecture was going on. The professor heard what I said and he asked me to come by after class. He told me that he knows somebody, who lives in India and most likely can help me out. But unfortunately they lost contact to each other and the only thing I had was his name and his probable location: Chennai. So I started to do a little bit of reasearch on that (Google is your friend) and I found him finally. So I wrote him an email introducing myself and asking him, if he knows my professor. Directly with his positive answer he asked me in what field of reasearch I am interested in and he forwarded my email to the appropriate professors, who organised and fixed my stay in India.

So basically it was pure fortune and coincidence that I went to India. But at the end, it was the best thing I have ever done.

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PISA is a famous town in Italy, because of the Leaning Tower. But it is also the name for my graduation project I did in Chennai, India. PISA stands for PHP Intelligent Search Application.

Abstract

This paper describes an idea, how result lists of search engines could be improved and adapted to user profiles automatically. To achieve this goal, two different algorithms have been implemented. One is a probabilistic method of classification known as Bayesian algorithm and the other is TF-IDF (Term Frequency – Inverse Document Frequency), frequently used in information retrieval systems. Along with a detailed description of the objects in PISA, the test results of different conditions and algorithms are compared and summarised. In addition, needed fundamentals of network protocols, database access, and scripting languages are introduced and explained.

Download

The paper can be downloaded here: pisa.pdf

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