The Indian-American magazine India Currents is a monthly publication that focuses on exploring the heritage and culture of India as it exists in the United States. The magazine is published in three print editions across the U.S. in Northern California, Southern California and Washington, D.C. and is also accessible digitally. It has the largest circulation among Indian publications in the United States.

In its August issue, India Currents featured a cover story and discussion between Mathematics Professor Manil Suri and A.X. Ahmad, author of The Caretaker (IC, September 2013) and the recently-released The Last Taxi Ride—books one and two of the Ranjit Singh Trilogy. Suri is author of Death of Vishnu, The Age of Shiva, and City of Devi. The two authors discussed how Bollywood has influenced their writing. Below is an excerpt from the article in which Suri discusses how Bollywood resonates in the City of Devi:

The book is made to reflect on some of the larger-than-life aspects of Bollywood movies. The Superdevi herself arrives in one scene, she’s made up like a Bollywood star, and there are special effects and all of that. Once I got into this, the whole book became immersed in this Bollywood imagery….it was a deliberate playing with the genre. My book is about the end of the world seen through the eyes of Bollywood, and that was something I liked because it gave the novel the right flair. You don’t want the end of the world to be depressing! If you’re going to go out, go out in Bollywood style!

The magazine also featured a review of the City of Devi in which writer Jeanne E. Fredriksen wrote, “the story is beautifully told as an all-encompassing romance and present-day end time saga via alternating sections of Sarita’s and Jaz’s chronicles. Moreover, their stories internally alternate between past and present until there is nowhere to go but to move forward together.”

To read the featured article with Suri, “Bollywood Ties, Literary Knots,” click here. To read the review of City of Devi, click here.

As the Buffalo Bills search for a new owner, state and county officials in New York could be faced with a complicated scenario if the new owner arrives with a demand to build a new stadium. An article published July 28 in The Buffalo News examines the question: do taxpayers get their money’s worth by public dollars helping to build sports stadiums? 

Considering the situation in Buffalo, Economics Professor Dennis Coates was interviewed for the story and said teams are increasingly getting money from taxpayers to directly help with operating costs of stadiums.

One of the arguments for a new stadium in Buffalo is that if it keeps the Bills there, it’s good for the community’s sense of pride. In the article, Coates recalled growing up in Western New York when basketball’s Buffalo Braves left in 1978. “I don’t think anybody cared much. But the Bills? People would care.”

Coates lived in the Baltimore area when the Colts football team left for Indianapolis. “I saw firsthand how that made people here feel. … That sort of thing was like losing a loved one.” But, he cautioned, taxpayers should not think a new Bills’ stadium would be an economic boost for the region. In fact, studies have shown that the stadium deals cost more each year to taxpayers – when all the subsidies are factored in – than they return on any sort of dollar basis.

Coates was also interviewed by The Baltimore Sun for a July 28 article looking at the decision to change the name of the University of Maryland’s Comcast Center to the Xfinity Center. Discussing the benefit of naming rights agreements in college sports and looking at what the deal may mean for the Xfinity brand, Coates said, “that doesn’t mean they don’t get some sort of goodwill out of it,” he added, “they must be doing it because they think it generates profit.” Changing the Comcast Center’s name “is kind of an unusual case” because it doesn’t involve a new corporate player, Coates said. “Usually it’s a complete change in the company.”

To read the complete version of both articles, click below:
Teams have upper hand in stadium negotiations (The Buffalo News)
University of Maryland arena is rechristened Xfinity Center (The Baltimore Sun)

Update: Coates was also interviewed for an article about the possibility of a new stadium for the Buffalo Bills in The Deal Pipeline on August 7. That article can be found here. 

PhD Dissertation Proposal

“S:PT.-HAS NO PMD.”
Information Extraction from Clinical Notes

Clare Grasso

11:00am Monday, 4 August 2014, ITE 325b

Clinical decision support (CDS) systems aid clinical decision making by matching an individual patient’s data to a computerized knowledge base in order to present clinicians with patient-specific recommendations. The need for methods to extract the clinical information in the free-text portions of the clinical record into a form that clinical decision support systems could access and utilize has been identified as one of the top five grand challenges in clinical decision support. This research focuses on investigating scalable machine learning and semantic techniques that do not rely on an underlying grammar to extract medical concepts in the text in order to apply them in CDS on commodity hardware and software systems. Additionally, by packaging the extracted data within a semantic representation, the facts can be combined with other semantically encoded facts and reasoned over. This allows other clinically relevant facts to be inferred which are not directly mentioned in the text and presented to the clinician for decision making.

Committee: Drs. Anupam Joshi (chair), Tim Finin, Aryya Gangopadhyay, Charles Nicholas, Claudia Pearce and Eliot Siegel

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