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Spring 2022 Commencement ceremonies and related events are under way on Virginia Tech campuses in Blacksburg and in the greater metropolitan D.C. area. 

“We celebrate our graduates who have persevered over hurdles raised by the Covid pandemic to reach their academic goals. For longer than anyone would have suspected at the onset of the pandemic, this group of students had to adapt to a virtual environment. Online, they attended classes, met with their advisors, conducted research, presented papers at conferences, and worked at internships,” said  Naren Ramakrishnan, the Thomas L. Phillips Professor of Engineering in the Department of Computer Science at Virginia Tech and director of the Sanghani Center for Artificial Intelligence and Data Analytics. “We are proud of all they have accomplished during their years at the center and wish them continued success as they begin their professional careers.”

Following is a list of Sanghani Center graduates:

Ph.D.

Chidubem Arachie, advised by Bert Huang, has earned a Ph.D. in computer science. His research interest lies in developing algorithms for weakly supervised learning. The title of his dissertation is “Learning with Constraint-Based Weak Supervision.” Arachie is joining Google in California as a software engineer.

Yali Bian, advised by Chris North, has earned a Ph.D. in computer science. His research interests include human-computer interaction, visual analytics, machine learning, and machine teaching. The title of his dissertation is “Human-AI Sensemaking with Semantic Interaction and Deep Learning.” Bian is joining the Human and AI Systems Research (HAR) Lab at Intel Labs, Santa Clara, California, as a research scientist. 

Subhodip Biswas, advised by Naren Ramakrishnan, has earned a Ph.D. in computer science. His primary research lies in spatial data mining, geographic information systems, education, and crowdsourcing. The title of his dissertation is “Spatial Optimization Techniques for Redistricting.” He has also earned a graduate certificate in urban computing. Biswas is joining the AI verification team at the autonomous vehicle company Zoox in Foster City, California.

Debanjan Datta, advised by Naren Ramakrishnan, has earned a Ph.D. in computer science. Datta’s research focus is on data mining and machine learning, with a special interest in algorithms on anomaly detection and tabular data. The title of his dissertation is “A Framework for Automated Discovery and Analysis of Suspicious Trade Records.” Datta is joining Amazon Web Services (AWS) as an applied scientist.

Chen Gao, advised by Jia-Bin Huang, has earned a Ph.D. in electrical and computer engineering. His research interest lies in the field of computational photography and computer vision. He is focusing on view synthesis and video manipulation. The title of his dissertation is “Learning Consistent Visual Synthesis.” Chen will be joining Meta in Seattle, Washington, as a research scientist.

Taoran Ji, advised by Chang-Tien Lu, has earned a Ph.D. in computer science. His research interests include natural language processing, text mining, and machine learning. The title of his dissertation is “On Modeling Dependency Dynamics of Sequential Data: Methods and Applications.” Ji has joined Moody’s Analytics in New York, as director, artificial Intelligence and machine learning. 

Xiaolong Li, advised by Lynn Abbott, has earned a Ph.D. in electrical and computer engineering. His primary research interest is in the area of computer vision, with a special focus on deep 3D representations learning toward dynamic scene understanding. The title of his dissertation is “3D Deep Learning for Object-Centric Geometric Perception.” Li is joining AWS AI in Seattle, Washington, as an applied scientist.

Yuliang Zou, advised by Jia-Bin Huang, has earned a Ph.D. in electrical and computer engineering. His research interest lies in designing label-efficient and/or robust visual understanding methods. The title of his dissertation is “Label-Efficient Visual Understanding with Consistency Constraints.” Zou is joining Waymo, an autonomous driving technology company in Mountain View, California, as a research scientist.

Master’s Degree

Larissa Basso, advised by Chang-Tien Lu, has earned a master’s degree in computer science. Her primary research focus is satellite image retrieval. The title of her thesis is “CLIP-RS: A Cross-modal Remote Sensing Image Retrieval Based on CLIP, Northern Virginia Case Study.” 

Chih-Fang Chen, advised by Chang-Tien Lu, has earned a master’s degree in computer science. His primary research interest is urban computing. The title of  his thesis is “Metrohelper: A Real-time Web-based System for Metro Incidents Detection Using Social Media.” Chen is joining Amazon as a software developer engineer.

Kai-Hsiang Cheng, advised by Chang-Tien Lu, has earned a master’s degree in computer science. His primary research interests are applied machine learning and data mining. The title of  his thesis is “Leverage Fusion of Sentiment Features and Bert-based Approach to Improve Hate Speech Detection.” Cheng is joining Gettr in New York City as software developer.

Riya Dani, advised by Ismini Lourentzou, has earned a master’s degree in computer science. Her primary research involves generating videos of unseen concepts using machine learning. The title of her thesis is “Concept Vectors for Zero-Shot Video Generation.” Dani is joining Amazon Web Services (AWS) in Northern Virginia as an associate solutions architect.

Xuan Li, advised by Lynn Abbott, has earned a master’s degree in electrical and computer engineering. His research focuses on continual learning that prevents a deep neural model from catastrophic forgetting in sequential tasks. The title of his thesis is “Referencing Unlabelled World Data to Prevent Catastrophic Forgetting in Class-incremental Learning.” Li is joining Amazon as software development engineer.

Gopikrishna Rathinavel, advised by Naren Ramakrishnan, has earned a master’s degree in computer science. His research focus is on using deep learning techniques for wireless anomaly detection. The title of his thesis is “Detecting Irregular Network Activity with Adversarial Learning and Expert Feedback.”

Stephen Sun, advised by Chang-Tien Lu, has earned a master’s degree in computer science. His primary research interest is social media analytics. The title of his thesis is “Estimate Flood Damage Using Satellite Images and Twitter Data.” Sun is joining TikTok Inc. in Mountain View, California, as a software engineer.

Han Xu, advised by Lynn Abbott, has earned a master’s degree in electrical and computer engineering. His research focuses on skin segmentation without color information. The title of his thesis is “Color Invariant Skin Segmentation.” 

With restrictions to working in physical office space still in effect, graduate students at the Sanghani Center are working remotely this summer for companies, labs, and programs from coast to coast. Students are not only gaining real-world experience from internships and other opportunities but, in many cases, they are also able to advance their own research interests.

Following is a list of Sanghani Center students and the work they are doing:

Badour AlBahar, a Ph.D. student in electrical and computer engineering, is a computer vision intern at Adobe Vision group in San Jose, California. She is working on human reposing and animation. Her advisor is Jia-Bin Huang.

Sikiru Adewale, a Ph.D. student in computer science, is a software development engineer intern at Amazon Web Service in Seattle, Washington. He is working on data transfer and storage on the AWS snowball device. His advisor is Ismini Lourentzou.

Vasanth Reddy Baddam, a Ph.D. student in computer science, is an research intern at Siemens in Princeton, New Jersey. He is working on contributing to industrial research projects on leveraging machine learning to analyze multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) algorithms and implement them. His advisor is Hoda Eldardiry. 

Subhodip Biswas, a Ph.D. student in computer science, is working on Bayesian optimization techniques for automated machine learning (AutoML) and robust artificial intelligence systems as part of the Journeyman Fellowship he received from the DEVCOM Army Research Laboratory (ARL) Research Associateship Program (RAP) administered by the Oak Ridge Associated Universities (ORAU). His advisor is Naren Ramakrishnan.

Jie Bu, a Ph.D. student in computer science, is a research intern at Carbon 3D in Redwood City, California. He is working on artificial intelligence-powered computational geometry. His advisor is Anuj Karpatne.

Si Chen, a Ph.D. student in computer engineering, is a research intern at InnoPeak Technology in Seattle, Washington. She is working on research on model privacy protection. Her advisor is Ruoxi Jia.

Kai-Hsiang Cheng, a master’s degree student in computer science, is an intern at GTV Media Group in New York City. He is working on the content management system of the media’s platform. His advisor is Chang-Tien Lu.

Riya Dani, a master’s degree student in computer science, is a software engineer intern at Microsoft. She is working on web application developments under Azure. Her advisor is Ismini Lourentzou.

Debanjan Datta, a Ph.D. student in computer science, is an intern on the Amazon Web Services team at Amazon in Seattle, Washington. He is working on time series characterization and classification.  His advisor is Naren Ramakrishnan.

Arka Daw, a Ph.D. student in computer science, is an applied scientist intern at Amazon Web Services Lambda Science Team in Seattle, Washington.  He is working on developing an automated causal machine learning framework for setting up experiments and estimating causal effects from observational data. His advisor is Anuj Karpatne.

Yue Feng, a Ph.D. student in electrical and computer engineering, is an intern with the Snap Research Creative Vision Team in Santa Monica, California. She is working on a 3D computer vision project. Her advisor is Jia-Bin Huang.

Chen Gao, a Ph.D. student in electrical and computer engineering, is a research intern at Google in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He is working on creating video panoramas using a cellphone. His advisor is Jia-Bin Huang.

Jianfeng He, a Ph.D. student in computer science, is an intern at Tencent AI Lab in Seattle,Washington. He is working on research about multi-modal dialogue with mentors Linfeng Song and Kun Xu. His advisor is Chang Tien-Lu.

Taoran Ji, a Ph.D. student in computer science, is an intern at Moody’s Analytics in New York City. He is working on analyzing credit and financial data for the global financial markets, which will drive algorithmic improvements in Moody’s Analytics core machine learning and artificial intelligence-driven products. His advisor is Chang-Tien Lu.

Adheesh Juvekar, a Ph.D. student in computer science, is a machine learning and natural language processing intern at Deloitte & Touche LLP. He is working on automatically extracting relevant information from transactional invoices using state of the art deep learning techniques. His advisor is Edward Fox.

M. Maruf, a Ph.D. student in computer science, is a machine learning engineering intern at Qualcomm GNSS/location team in Santa Clara, California. He is applying machine learning techniques to hybrid technology fusion for navigation/positioning in mobile, wearable, automotive, and micro-mobility applications. His advisor is Anuj Karpatne.

Nikhil Muralidhar, a Ph.D. student in computer science, received an Applied Machine Learning Summer Research Fellowship at Los Alamos National Lab in Los Alamos, New Mexico, to work with researchers on physics-informed machine learning for modeling adsorption equilibria in fluid mixtures. His advisor is Naren Ramakrishnan. 

Makanjuola Ogunleye, a Ph.D. student in computer science, is an application support engineer intern at Northwestern Mutual in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. His duties include coding, testing, and implementing complex programs from user specifications. He is also performing client data analysis to support engineering technology to improve and facilitate customer success. His advisor is Ismini Lourentzou.

Nishan Pokharel, a master’s degree student in computer science, is a software engineering intern at Capital One in Mclean, Virginia.  He is working on network infrastructure automation. His advisor is Chris North

Avi Seth, a master’s degree student in computer science, is serving as a graduate team leader this summer for Virginia Tech’s Data Science for the Public Good program. The group works on projects that address state, federal, and local government challenges around today’s relevant and critical social issues. His advisor is Ismini Lourentzou.

Mia Taylor, a master’s degree student in computer science, is a software development intern at Amazon Web Services in Seattle, Washington. Her team is working with Comprehend AutoML which allows customers to build customized natural language processing models using their own data. Her advisor is Lifu Huang.

Yiran Xu, a Ph.D. student in electrical and computer engineering, is an intern with the Snap Research Creative Vision Team in Santa Monica, California. He is working on 3D human reconstruction and video generation/manipulation. His advisor is Jia-Bin Huang.

Shuaicheng Zhang, a Ph.D. student in computer science, is a natural language processing (NLP) research intern at Deloitte in New York City. He is part of the Audit and Assurance AI innovation team, working on open information extraction on internal control files to help auditors effortlessly process these files. His advisor is Lifu Huang.

Yuliang Zou, a Ph.D. student in electrical and computer engineering, is a research intern at Waymo in Mountainview, California. He is working on the perception problem for self-driving cars.  His advisor is Jia-Bin Huang.

A national pandemic that forced the closing of physical offices has not stopped graduate students at the Discovery Analytics Center from working remote internships at companies, research laboratories, and other institutions across the country. For many students, summer internships help further their own research as they gain real world experience.

Following is a list of DAC students and the work they are doing for the next few months:

Chidubem Arachie, a Ph.D. student in computer science, is a research intern at Google Research in Mountain View California. He is working on generative modeling for 3D shapes. His advisor is Bert Huang.

John Aromando, a Ph.D. student in computer science, is an intern at Graf Research in Blacksburg, working on utilizing natural language processing to support the software verification process. His advisor is Edward Fox.

Hongjie Chen, a Ph.D. student in computer science, is a data science research intern at Adobe in San Jose, California. He is on the Cloud Technology Team, researching cloud resource allocation strategy. His advisor is Hoda Eldardiry.

Nurendra Choudhary, a Ph.D. student in computer science, is an applied science intern with the Amazon Search Team in Palo Alto, California. He is working on representation learning of products by leveraging the heterogeneous relations between them. His advisor is Chandan Reddy.

Chen Gao, a Ph.D. student in electrical and computer engineering, is a research intern at Google in Mountain View, California. He is working on improvements to the portrait mode on the Google Pixel phone. His advisor is Jia-Bin Huang.

Akshita Jha, a Ph.D. student in computer science, is a research intern in the Interdigital AI Lab in Palo Alto, California. Her work involves building interpretable natural language processing models. Her advisor is Chandan Reddy.

Prerna Juneja, a Ph.D. student in computer science, is an intern at the Information Science Institute at the University of Southern California with Emilio Ferrara, assistant research professor and associate director of Applied Data Science in the Department of Computer Science. She is investigating the spread of COVID-19 related conspiracy theories on Twitter. Her advisor is Tanushree Mitra.

You Lu, a Ph.D. student in computer science, is a research intern at NEC Labs America in Princeton, New Jersey, working on sequence labeling for signals in fibers. His advisor is Bert Huang.

Shruti Phadke, a Ph.D. student in computer science, is doing a research internship with James Pennebaker, a professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Texas at Austin. She is studying online communities, their social processes, and behaviors. Her advisor is Tanushree Mitra.

Aarathi Raghuraman, a master’s degree student in computer science, is an intern at GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), working with the Digital, Data, and Analytics team to maximize process yield in upstream biopharm manufacturing. She is advised by Lenwood Heath.

Esther Robb, a master’s degree student in electrical and computer engineering, is a research intern at Google working with a team in San Francisco on reinforcement learning. Her advisor is Jia-Bin Huang.

Mandar Sharma, a master’s student in computer science, is working as a machine learning intern with Toyota Motors North America, specifically the Toyota Racing Development (TRD) branch, to help NASCAR drivers make better decisions when they are racing. His advisor is Naren Ramakrishnan.

Aarohi Sumant, a master’s student in computer science, is an intern at Amazon. She is working with the Kindle Marketing Team to develop machine learning techniques for book recommendations based on cross user activities as well as single-user activities on different Amazon platforms. Her advisor is Edward Fox.

Afrina Tabassum, a Ph.D. student in computer science is a data science intern in the Data Science for The Public Good (DSPG) program at the Biocomplexity Institute’s Social and Decision Analytics Division (SDAD) at the University of Virginia. She is working on projects that address state, federal, and local government challenges around critical social issues relevant in the world today. Her advisor is Hoda Eldardiry.

Mia Taylor, a senior undergrad in computer science, is interning at Amazon Web Services in the Route 53 (DNS) service. Her advisor is Hoda Eldardiry.

Sirui Yao, a Ph.D. student in computer science, is an intern at Google, working on tag prediction for recommender systems through learning items and tags embeddings. Her advisor is Bert Huang.

Shengzhe Xu, a Ph.D. student in computer science, is interning at Facebook Ads Core ML, working on attention-based time sequential embedding aggregation. Xu’s advisor is Naren Ramakrishnan.

Ming Zhu, a Ph.D. student in computer science, is interning at Amazon. She is an applied scientist intern for Amazon Alexa AI, working on conversational query representation learning. Zhu’s advisor is Chandan Reddy.

Yuliang Zou, a Ph.D. student in electrical and computer engineering, is working on learning with less/weaker annotations at Google. His advisor is Jia-Bin Huang.

A number of graduate students at the Discovery Analytics Center have opted for internships and jobs at companies and national laboratories across the country this summer as a way of both benefiting their own research and gaining real world experience.

Following is a list of where they are for the next few months:

Aman Ahuja, a Ph.D. student in computer science, is an applied scientist intern at Amazon in Palo Alto, California. He is on the Amazon Search Team, researching product search techniques. His advisor is Chandan Reddy.

Tyler Chang, a Ph.D. student in computer science, has begun a six-month appointment at Argonne National Laboratory in Chicago, Illinois. He is one of 70 graduate students who received an appointment from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science Graduate Student Research (SCGSR) to work on his thesis. The goal is to produce a portable multi-objective optimization software which Argonne could utilize in the future. Chang’s advisor is Layne Watson.

Jinwoo Choi, a Ph.D. student in electrical and computer engineering, is a research intern at NEC Labs America, San Jose, California, working on domain adaptation for video. Choi’s advisor is  Jia-Bin Huang.

Chen Gao, a Ph.D. student in electrical and computer engineering, is a research intern on a video completion project at Facebook in Seattle, Washington. He is working on an algorithm that synthesizes missing regions of videos. His advisor is Jia-Bin Huang.

Liuqing Li, a Ph.D. student in computer science, is on the Content Science team at Yahoo! Research in Sunnyvale, California, working on document recommendation through reinforcement learning. His advisor is Edward Fox.

Sneha Mehta, a Ph.D. student in computer science, is a data science intern at the Netflix headquarters in Los Gatos, California. She is researching novel methods to improve machine translation for subtitles. Her advisor is Naren Ramakrishnan.

Shruti Phadke, a Ph.D. student in computer science, is an intern at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. She is working on developing scalable machine learning and Natural Language Processing (NLP) algorithms to detect public sentiment in news and social media. Her advisor is Tanushree Mitra.

Esther Robb, a master’s degree student in electrical and computer engineering, is a research intern at Google in Mountainview, California, where she is working on facial recognition. Her advisor is Jia-Bin Huang.

Alexander Rodriguez, a Ph.D. student in computer science, is a research intern at WalmartLabs in Sunnyvale, California. His advisor is B. Aditya Prakash.

Dhruv Sharma, a master’s student in computer science, is working at Kitware, Inc., in Carborro, North Carolina. As a research and development intern, Sharma’s work includes some medical image processing/machine learning tasks; mining EHR data for prediction of risk, procedure outcome, or other events; and analyzing training needs of healthcare providers. He is advised by Chandan Reddy.

Tian Shi, a Ph.D. student in computer science, is an intern at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, Washington, where he is working on machine comprehension and question-answering on clinical notes in the healthcare domain. His advisor is Chandan Reddy.

Shih-Yang Su, a Ph.D. student in electrical and computer engineering, is a research intern at Borealis AI in Vancouver, Canada, working on graph convolution for structural prediction. His advisor is Jia-Bin Huang.

Deepika Rama Subramanian, a master’s student in computer science, is a mobility intern at Lam Research, Fremont, California, working on designing and developing an end-to-end mobile application for field engineers at Lam Research. Her advisor is Tanushree Mitra.

Anika Tabassum, a Ph.D. student in computer science, is a research intern at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, where she will be applying data mining and visualization skills in two U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) projects: “Reynolds Landing Research” and “North American Energy Resilience Model.” Her advisor is B. Aditya Prakash.

Sai Sindhura Tipirneni, a master’s student in computer science, is working in the Quantum Computing Lab at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Her advisor is Chandan Reddy.

Ping Wang, a Ph.D. student in computer science, is an intern at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, Washington, where she is working on question answering on electronic medical records using Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques. Wang’s advisor is Chandan Reddy.

Sirui Yao, a Ph.D. student in computer science, is a research intern at Google AI in New York City, where she is studying noise and bias in dynamic recommender systems. Her advisor is Bert Huang.

Ming Zhu, a Ph.D. student in computer science, is at Amazon in Seattle, Washington. She is an applied scientist intern for Amazon Comprehend Medical, working on Natural Language Processing on medical corpora using deep learning. Zhu’s advisor is Chandan Reddy.

Yuliang Zou, a Ph.D. student in electrical and computer engineering, is a research intern at NEC Labs America in San Jose, California, where he is working on unsupervised scene structure learning. His advisor is Jia-Bin Huang.

Chen Gao traveled to Newcastle, United Kingdom, last month to present a paper on human-object interaction at the 29th British Machine Vision Conference, a major international conference on computer vision and related areas held in the UK.

Gao is a first-year Ph.D. student in the Bradley Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. After graduating with a master’s degree in electrical and computer engineering from the University of Michigan Ann Arbor in April 2017, Gao came to Virginia Tech as a visiting research assistant to work with Jia-Bin Huang. It was this experience that sparked his interest in the university’s Ph.D. program. Huang, a faculty member at the Discovery Analytics Center, is now his advisor.

“Being a DAC student in the era of big data, I really appreciate that we can benefit from access to massive datasets and develop algorithms to learn patterns,” said Gao, whose career goal is to work in research and development in a company like Facebook or Google.

Gao’s passion for computer vision began with a TED talk by Stanford University Professor Feifei Li. “She spoke about giving sight to machines, teaching them to see and then helping us see better,” he said. “After listening to her, I kept asking myself: ‘How could we teach machines to be more intelligent and, in return, how could computer vision benefit our daily life and the natural environment to create a better future?’”

This question, Gao said, is the motivation behind his “challenging, but very practical” research at DAC. His focus is on human-object interaction detection, a crucial step toward a finer-grained understanding of an image.

“Given an image, we not only detect all the objects in the image, but also detect all the interactions between human and objects. Millions of images are uploaded to social media every day, thus it is essential to cluster images according to the content. Our research provides a potential solution to automatically cluster images according to actions,” he said.

Gao has submitted the paper, Panoramic Robust PCA for Foreground-Background Separation on Noisy, Free-Motion Camera Video, to the IEEE Transactions on Computational Imaging for review. This paper is a journal extension of Augmented Robust PCA for Foreground-Background Separation on Noisy, Moving Camera Video at the 2017 IEEE Global Conference on Signal and Information.

His projected graduation date is June 2022