Sanghani Center Student Spotlight: Syuan-Ying Wu
Metro systems are vital to many people’s daily lives, but they face safety or reliability challenges, such as criminal activities or infrastructure disruptions. Real-time threat detection and analysis are crucial to ensure their safety and reliability.
Syuan-Ying (Justin) Wu, a master’s degree student in computer science whose research focuses on social media analytics and software development, is currently part of a research team that is working with the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA) to address these issues.
With fellow students at the Sanghani Center and his advisor, Chang-Tien Lu, Wu has been instrumental in developing the MetroScope real-time threat/event detection system that can automatically analyze event development; prioritize events based on urgency; send emergency notifications via emails; provide efficient content retrieval; and self-maintain the system.
“This is a great improvement over many existing systems that can detect the event but cannot analyze it or prioritize it,” Wu said. “And our system offers other advantages like not having to continuously monitor system notifications.”
Their collaborative paper, “MetroScope: An Advanced System for Real-Time Detection and Analysis of Metro-Related Threats and Events via Twitter,” was published in the proceedings of the 46th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval held in Taipei, Taiwan, this past summer.
Wu, who earned a bachelor’s degree in applied mathematics at Fu Jen Catholic University in Taiwan, said this research collaboration with a metropolitan metro system is a good example of what led him to pursue his master’s degree at Virginia Tech and the Sanghani Center. “The exceptional computer science program and distinguished professors have offered me the opportunity to find ways of applying cutting-edge technology to tackle a real-world problem,” he said. “It has been the perfect environment to achieve my goals.”
Projected to graduate this fall, Wu hopes to secure a position as a software engineer.