B. Aditya Prakash moves to DAC’s Arlington location
Aditya Prakash (left) and his Ph.D. student Anika Tabassum (right) at DAC in Arlington.
Aditya Prakash, associate professor of computer science and faculty at the Discovery Analytics Center has moved from Blacksburg to DAC’s location at the Virginia Tech Research Center – Arlington.
“My work is frequently motivated by public health, urban computing, and web-related problems and this location is fertile ground for collaborations in these domains,” Prakash said. “Moving to the greater Washington D.C. metro area will help me further expand my research activities, due to its ‘one of its kind’ proximity to government agencies, companies, and hospitals/medical centers.”
In 2018, Prakash received a Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award from the National Science Foundation to help improve national security and public health. His work has been also been funded through grants and gifts from the Department of Energy, the National Security Agency, the National Endowment for Humanities, and from companies like Facebook.
Prakash said that Virginia Tech’s planned Innovation Campus in Arlington and Alexandria would provide greater opportunity not only for research but also for recruiting talented students.
Prakash is currently advising five Ph.D. students in core computer science and other interdisciplinary programs.
Anika Tabassum, who is also a National Science Foundation research trainee in the UrbComp graduate certificate program, has joined Prakash at DAC in Arlington. Alex Rodriguez plans to make the move from Blacksburg in the Spring. They are working on urban computing and sequence mining and epidemiology and graph mining, respectively.
In addition to his research, Prakash is teaching a graduate level course, CS5834:Introduction to Urban Computing, this semester. The course, offered remotely to Blacksburg students as well, is a core course in the UrbComp certificate program administered through the Discovery Analytics Center and covers the fundamentals of the growing area of using analytics to tackle challenges posed by increasing urbanization.