Thursday, December 30, 2010

Master's Thesis: Design and Implementation of a Scalable High-Speed Parallel Web Crawler

I have been planning to share this for quite sometime, and today finally I managed the time to do so. My Master's thesis covers a very fundamental component of search engines, namely Web crawlers. The research focus of my work is crawler efficiency which is related with scalability and speed of a Web crawler.

The proposed architecture extends the DRUM technique proposed in the best paper of WWW 2008 titled "IRLbot: Scaling to 6 Billion Pages and Beyond": the technique is used for a single-machine Web crawler. In the thesis, I extend it for a parallel crawler.

Following is my Master's thesis defense presentation, which I successfully passed on 16th December, 2010.

The full-text of the thesis will be available soon. Interested students/researchers may contact me for any questions, comments or feedback. Any researcher interested in the domain of Web crawling may also contact me if he/she has any suggestions. The full-text of the thesis can also be requested via email.

Tuesday, December 7, 2010

When There's Nothing to Eat in Korea There's Always Kimbab

Back in Pakistan when this situation arose of no time to cook anything, we had the option of Maggi noodles. But in Korea almost all noodles have some sort of pork (or pork ingredients) so is there no option of having some 2-minute thing? Nopes, there is the all-time Korean favorite Kimbab. Bab in Korean means cooked rice, so Pakistanis describe it as rice burger :), quite unusual and strange, right.

These days my husband and I are under the Masters thesis defense phase so most of the time we face this situation of no time but wanting something quick to eat so Kimbab comes to the rescue.

Gimbap or kimbap is a popular Korean dish made from steamed white rice (bap) and various other ingredients, rolled in gim (sheets of dried laver seaweed) and served in bite-size slices. Gimbap is often eaten during picnics or outdoor events, or as a light lunch, served with danmuji or kimchi. It is similar to the better-known Japanese sushi. We eat the Yaachae (vegetable) or chamchi (tuna) one as all the others have meat. Here are images of two variations of Kimbab. The first one is served in restaurants with a very delicious soya soup that is excellent for winters.
The second one is found in stores packed like a sandwich and is really cheap.






So now I am off to buy my Kimbab from the KAIST cafeteria store :)