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Virginia Tech’s week of commencement ceremonies is underway! The Graduate School Commencement ceremony was held Wednesday, May 8; the main ceremony is being held today, Friday, May 10; and the Washington, D.C. area ceremony will be held on Sunday, May 12.  

“Graduation is always a bittersweet time for faculty as we applaud our students’ accomplishments,” 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 very proud of all of them but saying good-bye is not so easy and we are always happy when they stay in touch – as many of them do — to let us know where their research is leading them.”

The following Sanghani Center students are among those who are receiving degrees:

Ph.D. Graduates

Abdulaziz Alhamadani, advised by Chang-Tien Lu, has earned a Ph.D. in computer science. His research interests mainly focus on developing efficient and applicable methods of training machine learning models for real-world applications such as pandemic prediction, drug overdose crises, and crisis management in various industries. His additional research areas include natural language processing, such as text classification and building large corpora for low-resource languages, machine learning ethics, and event detection.The title of his dissertation is “Integrated Predictive Modeling and Analytics for Crisis Management.” Alhamadani has joined the Computer Science Department at Florida Polytechnic University as an assistant professor.

Lulwah AlKulaib, advised by Chang-Tien Lu, has earned a Ph.D. in computer science. Her research focuses on social media analysis, machine learning, and natural language processing with a special interest in Arabic. The title of her dissertation is “Analyzing Networks with Hypergraphs: Detection, Classification and Prediction.” AlKulaib has joined Kuwait University as an assistant professor in computer science.

Hongjie Chen, advised by Hoda Eldardiry, has earned a Ph.D. in computer science. His research lies in the areas of graph neural networks, time-series analysis, and recommendation systems. The title of his dissertation is “Graph-based Time-series Forecasting in Deep Learning.”

Jiaying Gong, advised by Hoda Eldardiry, has earned a Ph.D. in computer science. Her research focuses on multisource machine learning and natural language processing. The title of her thesis is “Few-Shot and Zero-Shot Learning for Information Extraction.” Gong will join coreAI, eBay, in New York City, as an applied researcher.

Jianfeng He, advised by Chang-Tien Lu, has earned a Ph.D. in computer science. His research focus on computer vision centers on guided image editing. He also focuses on natural language processing, studying uncertainty analysis in its applications (e.g., text classification, few-shot learning, named entity recognition, and text summarization). The title of his dissertation is “Uncertainty Estimation in Natural Language Processing,” for which he received the Department of Computer Science Achievement Award for Best Ph.D. Research. In June, He will join Amazon as an applied scientist in Seattle, Washington. 

Ola Karajeh, advised by Edward Fox, earned a Ph.D. in computer science. Her research interests are graph machine learning, natural language processing, Twitter analysis, and public health. The title of her dissertation is “Improving Text Classification Using Graph-based Methods.”

Andreea Sistrunk, advised by Naren Ramakrishnan, has earned a Ph.D. in computer science. Her research interest is in human-computing Interaction with all forms that data science takes in information processing and its impact on society. She is equally interested in education and methods leveraging the state of the art in pedagogy and andragogy in computer science, advanced math, and engineering. The title of her dissertation is “Designing Human-Centered Collaborative Systems for School Redistricting.” Sistrunk will continue her work with the Geospatial Research Laboratory in the Washington, D.C. area, as a physical research scientist.

Master of Science Degree Graduates

Cho-Ting (Amanda) Lee, advised by Naren Ramakrishnan, has earned a master’s degree in computer science. Her research interests are in data mining and machine learning, with a focus on trade data analytics and anomaly detection. The title of her thesis is “Can an LLM find its way around a spreadsheet?”

Jiayue Lin, advised by Chris North, has earned a master’s degree in computer science. His research focus is on visual analytics and artificial intelligence, with a particular interest in refining deep learning-based image projections using semantic interaction methods. The title of his thesis is “ImageSI: Semantic Interaction for Deep Learning Image Projections.” 

Daniel Palamarchuk, advised by Chris North, has earned a master’s degree in computer science. His research focuses on visualizing temporal text, document, and topic data using pre-transformer embedding methods. The title of his thesis is “Temporal Topic Embeddings with a Compass.” Palamarchuk will work as a programming teacher in the Northern Virginia area and plans on pursuing a Ph.D. 

Ramaraja Ramanujan, advised by Edward Fox, has earned a master’s degree in computer science. His research focuses on data analysis of geospatial and administrative data, conducting statistical verifications and simulations, and visual analytics. The title of his thesis is “Improving Rainfall Index Insurance: Evaluating Effects of Fine-Scale Data and Interactive Tools in the PRF-RI Program.” Ramanujan will join Microsoft in Redmond, Washington, as a software engineer. 

Chia-Wei Tang, advised by Chris Thomas, has earned a master’s degree in computer science. His research focuses on the development of misinformation detection utilizing multimodal reasoning. The title of his thesis is “M3D: MultiModal MultiDocument Fine-Grained Inconsistency Detection.” Tang is joining Juniper Networks in Sunnyvale, California, as a software engineer. 

Lemara Williams, advised by Chris North, has earned a master’s degree in computer science. Her research centers around visualizing changes in projections over time. The title of her thesis is “TimeLink: Visualizing Diachronic Word Embeddings and Topics.” Williams will continue her studies and is beginning a computer science Ph.D. program in the Fall at the Washington University in St. Louis. 

Xiaona Zhou, advised by Ismini Lourentzou, has earned a master’s degree in computer science. Her research focuses on the applications of data science and machine learning. The title of her master’s thesis is “Hierarchical Bayesian Dataset Selection.” Zhou will be pursuing a Ph.D. in computer science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

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.