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Virginia Tech’s Fall Commencement ceremony for the Graduate School is now underway (livestream here) and seven students from the Sanghani Center are among those receiving degrees. 

“This has been a tough year and they successfully navigated obstacles caused by the COVID19 pandemic to achieve their academic goals and we are very proud of them,” 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. 

Following is a list of Sanghani Center 2021 summer and fall graduates:

Ph.D.

Khoa Doan, advised by Chandan Reddy, has earned a Ph.D. in computer science.  His primary research interests lie in Machine Learning and Information Retrieval. The title of his dissertation is “Generative models meet similarity search: efficient, heuristic-free and robust retrieval”.  Doan has joined Baidu Research as a machine learning researcher. 

You Lou, co-advised by Bert Huang and Naren Ramakrishnan, earned a Ph.D. in computer science. His research areas are structured prediction, probabilistic graphical models, variational inference, and deep generative models. The title of his dissertation is “Modeling Structured Data with Invertible Generative Models.” Lou has joined Motional, a driverless technology company, as a machine learning research scientist.

Anika Tabassum, advised by B. Aditya Prakash, has earned a Ph.D. in computer science. She also earned the Urban Computing graduate certificate. For her Ph.D. research, she worked to develop explainable and domain-guided machine learning frameworks for power systems to aid decision-making for emergency management authorities. The title of her dissertation is “Explainable and Network-based Approaches for Decision-making in Emergency Management.” Tabassum has joined Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee as a postdoctoral research associate in the Discrete Algorithms Group, working on various projects related to scientific machine learning. 

Tian Shi, advised by Chandan Reddy, has earned a Ph.D. in computer science. His primary research interests lie natural language processing and machine learning. The title of his dissertation is “Novel Algorithms for Understanding Online Reviews.” Shi has joined Moody’s Analytics as a machine learning research scientist.

Ping Wang, advised by Chandan Reddy, has earned a Ph.D. in computer science. Her primary research focuses on question answering, graph mining, information extraction, and survival analysis with their applications in the healthcare domain. The title of her dissertation is “Automatic Question Answering and Knowledge Discovery from Electronic Health Records.” Wang has joined the Computer Science Department at Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey, where she is an assistant professor.  

Master’s Degree

Eman Abdelrahman, advised by Edward Fox, has earned a master’s degree in computer science. Her research interest lies in applying machine learning and natural language processing on Arabic scientific datasets such as ETDs in order to improve the accessibility to Arabic scientific data. The title of her thesis is “Improving the Accessibility of Arabic ETDs with Metadata and Classification.” She is remaining at Virginia Tech and the Sanghani Center to pursue a Ph.D. in computer science, advised by Ismini Lourentzou. 

Aarathi Raghuraman, advised by Lenwood Heath, has earned a master’s degree in computer science. Her primary research interests lie in biomedical data science and bioinformatics. The title of her thesis is “Predicting Mutational Pathways of Influenza A H1N1 Virus using Q-learning. Raghuraman has joined LexisNexis Legal and Professional in Raleigh, North Carolina, as a data scientist.

Esther Robb, advised by Jia-Bin Huang, has earned a master’s degree in computer engineering. Her primary research interests lie in reinforcement learning and data-efficient learning. The title of her thesis is “Data-Efficient Learning in Image Synthesis and Instance Segmentation.” Robb is pursuing a Ph.D. in computer science at Stanford University.

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.