Prof. Carl Sable received his B.S.E. in Electrical Engineering from Princeton University in 1993.  From 1993 through 1997, he worked as a software design engineer at Microsoft.  As part of the Excel group, he helped develop versions of Excel ranging from Excel 5 through Excel 97.  From 1997 through 2003, Carl was a graduate student at Columbia University.  He received his Master's degree in Computer Science in 1999 and his Ph.D. in Computer Science in 2003.  As a graduate student, he was part of the Natural Language Processing research group, advised by Prof. Kathleen McKeown.  Carl’s research focused on the use of text categorization techniques to classify associated images.

Carl joined the Cooper Union faculty as an assistant professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering in 2003.  He was promoted to associate professor in 2009.  Currently, Carl regularly teaches a few of the required courses in the Computer Engineering track of EE, including Data Structures and Algorithms I and II and Software Engineering.  Carl commonly teaches Master's level electives including Artificial Intelligence, Databases, and Natural Language Processing.  He also commonly advises Senior Projects.  Other courses that Carl has taught in the past include Digital Logic Design, Advanced Computer Architecture, and Compiler Theory.

Carl has advised close to 20 Master's students so far who have completed their degrees; the topics of their theses have ranged the gamut of EE, but the majority have focused on subtopics of artificial intelligence, machine learning, or natural language processing.  In addition to research through Master's students, Carl is currently one of the Principle Investigators of a funded research project involving collaboration with MaXentric Technologies.  The project is funded as an STTR, currently in Phase II.  The task involves the use of software defined radios, provided by Rockwell Collins, to create a Cognitive Communications Gateway Engine capable of translating signals between waveforms.

Carl also voluntarily serves as the Engineering Faculty Secretary, and he helps to coach teams of students entering the annual ACM Programming Competition.

EDUCATION:

Ph.D. Computer Science, 1999 – 2003.
    Columbia University, NY
    Advisor: Prof. Kathleen McKeown.
    Researcher in Columbia's Natural Language Processing Group.
    Research involved novel text categorization techniques and the categorization of images based on associated text.
    Helped to develop the Columbia Newsblaster system.
    Instructor for Introduction to Programming in C, 5 semesters.

M.S. Computer Science, 1997 – 1999.
    Columbia University, NY
    Researcher in Columbia's Natural Language Processing Group.

B.S.E. in Electrical Engineering, 1989 – 1993.
    Princeton University, NJ
    Graduated with honors.
    Elected to membership in Tau Beta Pi Engineering Honor Society.

WORK EXPERIENCE:

The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art
    Associate Professor of Computer Engineering
        2003 to present

AT&T
    Summer Researcher
        Summer 2000 and Summer 2001.
        Advised by Kenneth W. Church.
        Research involved exploration of a novel methodology for text categorization.

Microsoft
    Software Design Engineer in the Excel Group
        1993 – 1997.
        Added the ability of Excel 95 and Excel 97 to load and save files in Lotus format, allowing users to migrate files between applications.
        Reorganized the code of Excel 95 and Excel 97, improving the performance of many important features and reducing boot speed by more than 20%.
        Implemented AutoCorrect and AutoComplete for Far East versions of Excel 95.
        Created a version of Excel 5.0 to log actions of volunteer users for analysis; this data was used for decision making concerning later version of Excel.
        Fixed hundreds of documented bugs in Excel 5.0, Excel 95, and Excel 97.

Teaching Experience:

• Courses currently taught regularly: Artificial Intelligence, Natural Language Processing, Databases, Senior Projects, Software Engineering and Large System Design, Data Structures and Algorithms I and II.
• Other courses taught: Compiler Theory, Advanced Computer Architecture, Programming Languages, Digital Logic Design, Introduction to Computer Science.
• Have advised sixteen Master's students who have completed their Master's degrees so far.
• Have advised many undergraduate students in independent research projects.
• Have had six peer-reviewed publications during my time at Cooper Union, including three with students.
• Currently a principle investigator in a government funded, collaborative research project with MaXentric Technologies involving the use of software defined radios provided by Rockwell Collins to translate signals between waveforms.
• Voluntarily serving as the Engineering Faculty Secretary.
• Have coached Cooper Union's teams of students entering the annual, regional ACM Programming Competition every year since 2005.

Graduate School Dissertation:

"Robust Statistical Techniques for the Categorization of Images Using Associated Text" - The field of text categorization, which aids applications such as browsing, filtering, and search, has experienced a revival due to the vast amounts of unlabeled data available on line and as part of digital collections.  Almost all of the literature in the field, however, deals with the categorization of text-only documents.  Many of the same techniques can be applied to text associated with multimedia documents to label the multimedia component.  My dissertation provides an in-depth exploration of the use of text to categorize images.  It turns out that the text and categories associated with images tend to have different properties than those associated with full-length text documents such as e-mails, articles, and web pages.  Also, images provide us with an additional type of information; namely, low-level image features.  For these reasons, I have achieved success in several areas of research that have previously been problematic.  Some benefits of my work are demonstrated as part of the Columbia Newsblaster system, which finds, clusters, categorizes, and summarizes news on the web.  The system is accessible online at newsblaster.cs.columbia.edu.  Columbia Newsblaster predated Google News, and at the time that my thesis was written, it received tens of thousands of hits every day.

REFEREED PAPERS

• Brian Cheung and Carl Sable, "Hybrid Evolution of Convolutional Networks", in Proceedings of the 2011 International Conference on Machine Learning and Applications (ICMLA), Honolulu, HI, 2011 (to appear).
• Mohammed Billoo and Carl Sable, "Energy Consumption Reduction of a WSN Node Using 4-bit ADPCM", in Proceedings of the 2008 International Conference on Wireless Algorithms, Systems and Applications (WASA), Dallas, TX, 2008.
• Terence Magno and Carl Sable, "A Comparison of Signal-Based Music Recommendation to Genre Labels, Collaborative Filtering, Musicological Analysis, Human Recommendation, and Random Baseline", in Proceedings of the 2008 International Conference on Music Information Retrieval (ISMIR), Philadelphia, PA, 2008.
• Minsuk Lee, James Cimino, Hai Ran Zhu, Carl Sable, Vijay Shanker, John Ely, and Hong Yu, "Beyond Information Retrieval - Medical Question Answering", in Proceedings of the 2006 American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) Annual Symposium, Washington, D.C., 2006.
• Hong Yu, Carl Sable, and Hai Ran Zhu, "Classifying Medical Questions based on an Evidence Taxonomy", in Proceedings of the 2005 AAAI Workshop on Question Answering in Restricted Domains, Pittsburgh, PA, 2005.
• Hong Yu and Carl Sable, "Being Erlang Shen: Identifying Answerable Questions", in Proceedings of the 2005 IJCAI Workshop of Knowledge and Reasoning for Answering Questions, Edinburgh, 2005.
• Carl Sable, Kathleen McKeown, and Kenneth W. Church, "NLP Found Helpful (at least for one Text Categorization Task)", in Proceedings of the 2002 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), Philadelphia, PA, 2002.
• Kathleen R. McKeown, Regina Barzilay, David Evans, Vasileios Hatzivassiloglou, Judith L. Klavans, Ani Nenkova, Carl Sable, Barry Schiffman, and Sergey Sigelman, "Tracking and Summarizing News on a Daily Basis with Columbia's Newsblaster", in Proceedings of HLT 2002 Human Language Technology Conference, San Diego, CA, 2002.
• Carl Sable and Kenneth W. Church, "Using Bins to Empirically Estimate Term Weights for Text Categorization", in Proceedings of the 2001 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), Pittsburgh, PA, 2001.
• Carl L. Sable and Vasileios Hatzivassiloglou, "Text-based Approaches for Non-Topical Image Categorization", in International Journal on Digital Libraries, Volume 3, Issue 3, pp. 261-275, 2000.
• Carl L. Sable and Vasileios Hatzivassiloglou, "Text-Based Approaches for the Categorization of Images", in Proceedings of the Third Annual Conference on Research and Advanced Technology for Digital Libraries, Paris, 1999.
• Seungyup Paek, Carl L. Sable, Vasileios Hatzivassiloglou, Alexandro Jaimes, Barry H. Schiffman, Shih-Fu Chang, and Kathleen R. McKeown, "Integration of Visual and Text-Based Approaches for the Content Labeling and Classification of Photographs", in ACM SIGIR'99 Workshop on Multimedia Indexing and Retrieval, Berkeley, CA, 1999.

MASTER'S STUDENTS ADVISED (COMPLETED THESES)

• Brian W. Cheung, “Hybrid Evolution of Convolutional Neural Networks”, May 2011.
• Eugene Belilovsky, “Convolutional Neural Networks for Speaker-Independent Speech Recognition”, May 2011.
• Kwame-Lante Wright, “Denial of Service Intrusion Detection System for SIP-based VOIP”, May 2011.
• Kenneth Lam, “Go Artificial Intelligence Using Monte Carlo Tree Search Methods”, May 2011.
• Joshua Blachman, “NEVA: An Automated Summarizer for Narrative Texts”, April 2011.
• Subodh Shrestha, “Discovering Deep-web Sources and Extracting Content Using Automated Query Generation”, December 2010.
• Christopher Mitchell, “Applications of Convolutional Neural Networks to Facial Detection and Recognition for Augmented Reality and Wearable Computing”, May 2010.
• Yakov Okshtein, “RecycleBot 2.0: An Integrated Recycling Sorting and Separating System”, October 2009.
• Mohammed Billoo, “TinySARP: A Secure Routing Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks Based on Trust Metrics”, April 2009.
• Zhihan Zhou, “The Use of Speech Recognition Accuracy as an Objective Measurement for the Evaluation of Three Codecs”, December 2008.
• Nathan Lewis, "Distributed Particle Swarm Optimization Implementation with Applications in Feed-Forward Neural Networks", May 2008.
• Oluwadamilola Omojola, "GRIND: Finite Domain Integer Constraint Programming in C++", May 2008.
• Bijun Tan, "Combining DNA Microarray Data to Improve the Stability and Accuracy of Linear Discriminant Analysis", May 2008.
• Terence Magno, "Signal-Based Timbre Similarity Measures for Automatic Music Recommendation", October 2007.
• Qing Yuan, "A Biophysical Study of Cationic Polymers Used for Non-Viral Gene Therapy Delivery Using Continuous Configurational Biased Direct Monte Carlo Method", May 2007.
• Gaurav Namit, "Optimization of CMOS Analog Amplifiers Using Genetic Algorithms", May 2006.