Congratulations 2020 Fall Graduates! – Sanghani Center for Artificial Intelligence and Data Analytics

Among the graduates at Virginia Tech’s 2020 Fall commencement are five Ph.D.’s and six master’s students at the Discovery Analytics Center.

“This year has certainly been a challenging one but our students have persevered. Remotely, they completed required courses and successfully finalized and defended their research,” said Naren Ramakrishnan, the Thomas L. Phillips Professor of Engineering and director of the center. “We are very proud of all they have accomplished and wish them continued success in their new professional positions.”

Ph.D. graduates

Saurabh Chakravarty, advised by Edward Fox, is receiving a Ph.D. in computer science. His research focus is in the area of text analytics related to comprehending information contained in a text and processing/summarizing/classifying it for other downstream tasks or use cases. The title of Chakravarty’s dissertation is “Summarizing Legal Depositions.” He has joined JWPlayer, New York City, as a senior software engineer.

Jinwoo Choi, advised by Jia-Bin Huang, is receiving a Ph.D. in electrical and computer engineering. His research interest in computer vision and machine learning lies more specifically in understanding what is going on in a video. The title of his dissertation is “Action Recognition with Knowledge Transfer.” (Updated 2/16/21 — Choi will join the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Kyung Hee University, South Korea, as an assistant professor in March.)

Ziqian Song, advised by Edward Fox, is receiving a Ph.D. in computer science. Her primary research interests lie at the intersection of machine/deep learning and business intelligence. The title of her dissertation is “The Impact of Operational Crisis on Firm Equity Value: An Event-driven Approach.” Song is joining the University of Scranton as an assistant professor in the Department of Operations and Information Management, Kania School of Management.

Rongrong Tao, advised by Naren Ramakrishnan, is receiving a Ph.D. in computer science. Her research interest lies in forecasting population-level events. The title of Tao’s dissertation is “Anomalous Information Detection in Social Media.”

Amirsina Torfi, advised by Edward Fox, is receiving a Ph.D. in computer science. His research aimed at generating high-fidelity medical synthetic data with the power of AI to remedy the privacy issues of the healthcare domain. The title of Torfi’s dissertation is “Privacy-Preserving Synthetic Medical Data Generation with Deep Learning.” He has founded his own company, Instill AI.

Master’s graduates

Amr Aboelnaga, advised by Edward Fox, is receiving a master’s degree in computer engineering. His research interest is in classifying detected ultrasonic vocalizations to help autotomize the classification process for other domains such as neuroscience. Aboelnaga’s thesis is titled “USV Classification: an adaptation from DeepSqueak.”

Mohannad Al Ameedi, advised by Chang-Tien Lu, is receiving a master’s degree in computer science. He is a software engineer at Microsoft and was a part time student at Virginia Tech. Ameedi has also earned a graduate certificate in data analytics. His research interests are machine learning, deep learning, and information storage and retrieval.

Sampanna Kahu, advised by Edward Fox, is receiving a master’s degree in computer engineering. His research focus is on developing methods for effectively extracting figures and tables from scanned Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETDs), thereby making their downstream usage easier. His thesis is titled “Figure Extraction from Scanned Electronic Theses and Dissertations.” Kahu has joined Amazon, Inc. as a software development engineer 2.

Maanav Mehrotra, advised by Edward Fox, is receiving a master’s degree in computer science. His research involves developing automated techniques to convert question answer pairs into their canonical/declarative form to aid in extracting insights from the given document and assist in summarization. His thesis is titled “Generating Canonical Sentences from Question-Answer Pairs of Deposition Transcripts.”

Palakh Mignonne Jude, advised by Edward Fox, is receiving a master’s degree in computer science. Her research focus is improving classification of Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETDs) that enables other researchers to better utilize this information. Jude’s thesis is titled “Increasing Accessibility of Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETDs) Through Chapter-level Classification.” Jude has joined Bloomberg as a software engineer.

I-Hsuan (Lambert) Tao, advised by Chang-Tien Lu, is receiving a master’s degree in computer science. His research focus is on connecting Twitter posts and navigation application in order to reduce the chances of information inequivalent. The title of Tao’s thesis is “Twitter based Traffic Event Detection System Based On Land Use.” Tao is joining Amazon.