My name is Vibhav Agarwal, 3rd year computer science student at IIIT Bangalore. I am working as a summer research intern in the big data lab (eXascale) at University of Fribourg.

I am working on developing a search tool for analyzing and indexing Swiss federal data using tables embedded on their websites. My work involves linking a PDF scraping tool with the entity disambiguation code so as to develop a search mechanism/ indexing for all the tables scraped from the Swiss websites. The research part of my internship would involve developing a machine learning model that can represent each table into a vector space ie., Table2Vec. This, then could be used for indexing/ searching in the tool. I have been working under the supervision of Professor Philippe Cudre Mauroux and two other PhD students, Akansha Bharadwaj and Paolo Rosso. I am having a great learning opportunity at the lab. I meet and network with peers from around the globe, share a couple of ideas and learn something new every day.

Fribourg is a really great city. It’s small, quiet and full of friendly people. Everything is managed and organized really well. My stay has been really wonderful. On the weekends, I visited a few cities in Switzerland (like Bern, Geneva, Zurich etc), hiked a couple of famous mountains too. Switzerland is filled with mountains, lakes and is rich in medieval history. I have never visited such a scenic country that is so close to nature.

The amount of research that happens in Switzerland, especially in the field of computer science is unparalleled to any other country. Switzerland is definitely the place for research and higher studies.

Vibhav Agarwal
ThinkSwiss Research Fellow 2019