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Summer offers an opportunity for graduate students at the Sanghani Center to gain real-world experience in their research focus areas by working at major companies and labs across the country. This year these include places like Amazon AWS in Seattle, Washington; JPMorgan Chase & Co in New York City;  the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) in Cambridge, Massachusetts; Bosch in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; and the Intel Lab in Santa Clara, California.  

Following is a list of Sanghani Center students – where they are and what they are doing:

Satvik Chekuri, a Ph.D. student in computer science, is a natural language processing research intern working remotely with a Deloitte Audit and Assurance Data Science team in New York City. The team’s research focuses on the intersection of knowledge graphs and Large Language Models (LLMs) in the financial domain. His advisor is Edward A. Fox.

Hongjie Chen, a Ph.D. student in computer science, is a research scientist intern at Yahoo Research in Sunnyvale, California, working remotely with the advertising team. His advisor is Hoda Eldardiry.

Humaid Desai, a master’s degree student in computer science, is a software engineer intern at Ellucian in Reston, Virginia, working remotely. He is contributing to Ellucian’s SaaS-based solutions using React.js, Node.js, and AWS cloud technologies. His advisor is Hoda Eldardiry.

Jianfeng He, a Ph.D. student in computer science, is an applied scientist intern working onsite at Amazon AWS in Seattle, Washington, where he is researching text summarization. His advisor is Chang-Tien Lu.

Adheesh Juvekar, a Ph.D. student in computer science, is an applied scientist intern working on generative artificial intelligence onsite at Amazon in Boston, Massachusetts. His advisor is Ismini Lourentzou.

Myeongseob Ko, a Ph.D. student in electrical and computer engineering, is a machine learning research intern onsite at Bosch in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where he is working on a diffusion model. His advisor is Ruoxi Jia.

Shuo Lei, a Ph.D. student in computer science, is a graduate research intern onsite at Intel Labs in Santa Clara, California. She is working on developing a new few-shot learning method for multi-modal object detection to lower the effort of human annotation, training effort, and domain adaptation while meeting accuracy requirements for industrial usage. Her advisor is Chang-Tien Lu.

Wei Liu, a Ph.D. student in computer science, is a business intelligence intern at Elevance Health in Indianapolis, Indiana, working remotely with the data analysis team. Her advisor is Chris North.

Amarachi Blessing Mbakwe, a Ph.D. student in computer science, is an artificial intelligence research associate intern at JPMorgan Chase & Co in New York City, working onsite. She is conducting research on natural language processing-related problems that involve applying Large Language Models (LLMs) in finance. Her advisor is Ismini Lourentzou.

Makanjuola Ogunleye, a Ph.D student in computer science is a data scientist intern at Intuit, working onsite with the company’s AI Capital team in Mountain View, California. He is contributing to key machine learning products. His advisor is Ismini Lourentzou.

Mandar Sharma, a Ph.D. student in computer science, is a Ph.D. software engineering intern at Google AI in Kirkland, Washington, where he is working onsite on integrating state-of-the-art in natural language processing to the services provided by Google’s Cloud AI platforms. His advisor is Naren Ramakrishnan.

Ying Shen, a Ph.D. student in computer science, is a research intern onsite at Apple in New York City, where she is working on diffusion models. Her co-advisors are Lifu Huang and Ismini Lourentzou.

Afrina Tabassum, a Ph.D. student in computer science, is a research intern at Microsoft in Redmond, Washington, working onsite. She is co-advised by Hoda Eldardiry and Ismini Lourentzou.

Chiawei Tang, a master’s degree student in computer science, is a software engineer intern onsite at Juniper Network in Sunnyvale, California. His work involves creating a simulator designed to emulate the data output from wired network devices such as routers and switches. This strategic initiative facilitates system scalability testing for developers and significantly mitigates the financial impact associated with the procurement of physical hardware. His advisor is Chris Thomas.

Muntasir Wahed, a Ph.D. student in computer science, is a research intern onsite at IBM Research Almaden Lab in San Jose, California, working on the development and application of foundation models. His advisor is Ismini Lourentzou.

Zhiyang Xu, a Ph.D. student in computer science, is an applied scientist intern onsite at Amazon Alexa in Sunnyvale, California, where he is working on improving dialogue systems. His advisor is Lifu Huang.  

Raquib Bin Yousuf, a Ph.D. student in computer science, is among 25 students from 19 colleges chosen to attend the Washington Post Engineering class in Washington, D.C., this summer. He is working with state of the art artificial intelligence systems to develop new technology for the Washington Post. His advisor is Naren Ramakrishnan.

Yi Zeng, a Ph.D. student in computer engineering, is a research scientist intern onsite at Meta in Menlo Park, California, working on artificial intelligence fairness, finding ways to make state of the art AI systems more robust and responsible. His advisor is Ruoxi Jia.

Jingyi Zhang, a Ph.D. student in computer science, is a graduate intern working remotely with Amgen’s Computational Biology Group within Clinical Biomarkers & Diagnostics in Thousand Oaks, California. She is taking an active role in developing a data and analytics platform as well as participating in prostate therapeutic area translational computational biology. Her advisor is Lenwood Heath.

Shuaicheng Zhang, a Ph.D. student in computer science, is a summer intern onsite at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he is conducting research on the generative graph foundation model. His advisor is Dawei Zhou.

Xiaona Zhou, a Ph.D. student in computer science, is a University Research Association Sandia Graduate Summer Fellow at Sandia National Labs in Livermore, California. She is onsite working on anomaly detection in time series data. Her advisor is Ismini Lourentzou.

In her research at the Sanghani Center, Ph.D. student Amarachi Blessing Mbakwe is trying to develop advanced artificial intelligence methodologies for better medical imaging and clinical decision-making.

Her passionate drive to improve healthcare systems that could save millions of lives worldwide stems from personal experience. With the deaths of two close family members in her home region in Nigeria, Mbakwe witnessed firsthand the devastating consequences of delayed disease detection, poor treatment management, and a shortage of healthcare professionals. 

Targeted intervention can improve healthcare access for everyone and mitigate the disparities in clinical care often faced by underrepresented populations and minorities, said Mbakwe, who is advised by Ismini Lourentzou.

“By developing an AI algorithm that can accurately and quickly analyze chest x-rays, my research can help reduce the time and effort required for radiologists to interpret medical imaging tests which, in turn, can help ensure timely patient treatment or adjustment of treatments, especially in regions with a shortage of radiologists,” she said.

Mbakwe has published papers and articles in various journals and conferences. She presented a collaborative paper, “CheXRelNet: An Anatomy-Aware Model for Tracking Longitudinal Relationships between Chest X-Rays,” at the 2022 Medical Image Computing and Computer Assisted Intervention Society conference in Singapore and, this spring, at the Computing Research Association  2023 CRA-WP Grad Cohort Workshop for IDEALS in Hawaii and the 2023 Grad Cohort Workshop for Women.

CheXRelNet incorporates local and global visual features, utilizes inter-image and intra-image anatomical information, and learns dependencies between anatomical region attributes via graph attention to accurately predict disease progression for a pair of chest x-rays.

“I was attracted to Virginia Tech’s Department of Computer Science and the Sanghani Center because I wanted to conduct impactful research that benefits society and they provided me with the perfect platform to achieve my goals,” Mbakwe.

She said that the outcome of her research is not only applicable in healthcare but could also extend further to other applications in fairness and finance. Last summer she had the opportunity to intern at JPMorgan Chase & Co as an AI research associate and will be returning for a second internship this summer.

Mbakwe earned a bachelor’s degree in mathematics from Nnamdi Azikiwe University, Anambra State, Nigeria, and a master’s degree in computer science and quantitative methods from Austin Peay State University in Clarksville, Tennessee.

Projected to graduate in 2024, she aspires to become a researcher in an industrial research lab and eventually also assume the position of visiting/adjunct professor.

A Virginia Tech team of  five computer science Ph.D. students at the Sanghani Center for Artificial Intelligence and Data Analytics is one of 10 university teams selected internationally to compete in the Alexa Prize TaskBot Challenge 2. The team will design multimodal task-oriented conversational assistants that help customers complete complex multistep tasks while adapting to resources and tools available to the user, such as ingredients or equipment. Read more here.