Sanghani Center Student Spotlight: Ola Karajeh

In her Ph.D. research, Ola Karajeh is investigating efficient solutions to process social media such as Twitter for monitoring public health.

She is particularly interested in the brittleness of these systems, e.g., how non-informational tweets can lead to failure of public health monitoring systems. “Since many institutions report success from building supportive decision making systems based on data collected and processed from sources like Twitter, it is important to identify which posts are non-informational,” she said. 

Her approach involves three phases: Developing graph theoretic formulations; applying deep neural networks and adaptive learning techniques in the detection process; and validating solutions with the Arabic language.

Karajeh earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in computer science from the University of Jordan. She was drawn to Virginia Tech by its high ranking in the computer science field and for her matched interests with the Digital Library Research Laboratory and its director, Edward Fox, who now serves as her advisor.

“I really like being a part of the Sanghani Center,” she said, citing “the opportunity to be professional, dive into data analysis and machine learning and collaborate with others in the same area.”

Among her most recent collaborations are the papers: “Predicting Length of Stay for Cardiovascular Hospitalizations in the Intensive Care Unit: Machine Learning Approach,” at the 2020 42nd Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine & Biology Society (EMBC);  ‘Benchmarking Predictive Models in Electronic Health Records: Sepsis Length of Stay Prediction” at the 2020 International Conference on Advanced Information Networking and Applications Conference; and “Survey of Educational Cyber Ranges” during a workshop at the same conference.

Karajeh is projected to graduate in 2022 and her goal is to work in the academic field as a faculty member in a respected institution.