Sanghani Center welcomes new faculty member Ismini Lourentzou

The Sanghani Center for Artificial Intelligence and Data Analytics welcomes new faculty member Ismini Lourentzou, who joined the Virginia Tech Department of Computer Science as assistant professor in the Spring 2021 semester.

Lourentzou most recently served as a research scientist at IBM Almaden Research Center where she worked on machine learning, natural language processing, and information retrieval problems. In 2019, she was recognized with an IBM Invention Achievement Award and was selected to participate in Rising Stars in EECS.

In 2014, she received a Microsoft Azure Research Award.

Lourentzou said that the work of the Sanghani Center was one of the plusses that drew her to Virginia Tech.

Her research centers around machine learning challenges related to data — for example, learning with limited imperfect supervision, multimodal representation learning, and sequential decision making. This spring, Lourentzou is teaching a related course on Data Challenges in Machine Learning. Her current projects involve active and semi-supervised learning, self-supervision, interpretability, and graph adversarial learning. 

“We are delighted to have Ismini on our team,” said Naren Ramakrishnan, the Thomas L. Phillips Professor of Engineering in the Department of Computer Science and director of the Sanghani Center. “Her work in the areas of NLP, especially language modeling and human-in-the-loop learning, ties into many projects underway at the center. Our students will greatly benefit from her courses and expertise in this cutting-edge area.”

She received her Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Illinois at Urbana – Champaign.

Lourentzou earned two bachelor’s degrees, one in computer science from the Athens University of Economics and Business, Greece, and one in business administration from the University of West Attica, Greece (formerly the Technological Educational Institute of Athens).