The Sanghani Center is home to high-profile research, garnering recognition within and beyond the data analytics community.
Our talented team has been recognized with many competitive research awards and featured in major news and media outlets such as the Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, the Boston Globe and the Chronicle of Higher Education.
Graphic is from the paper “SAUCE: Truncated Sparse Document Signature Bit-Vectors for Fast Web-Scale Corpus Expansion”
Working toward a Ph.D. in computer science, Muntasir Wahed is delving into self-supervised learning, adversarial training, and out-of-distribution detection.
“Suppose we train a machine learning classifier to help medical diagnosis of a disease X given an X-ray,” Wahed said. “We collect a large dataset of X-rays for both positive and negative samples of the disease X. However, after we deploy the classifier in real life, it encounters confusing X-rays that have features not seen in any of the X-rays in the training samples. In such cases, it would be unreliable to classify the samples as positives or negatives. Instead, we would like to have a mechanism to recognize that these samples are so far unseen, or in other words, out-of-distribution.”
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.
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:
Virginia Tech’s virtual
university commencement will livestream tonight, Friday, May 14, at 6:15 p.m., and
degrees will be conferred at this time.
“We are extremely proud of our graduates who achieved their
goals despite more than a year of a pandemic that upended much of their lives,”
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. “When everything went virtual, they continued
to attend classes, meet with their advisors, conduct research, present papers
at conferences, and work at internships — all
testament to their perseverance and a good barometer of their future success .”
In this 2019 photo Colin Flynn, Vicki Keegan, and Susan Hembach from Loudoun County Public Schools meet at the Sanghani Center for Artificial Intelligence and Data Analytics with Ph.D. students Andreea Sistrunk, Subhodip Biswas, and Fanglan Chen to discuss how Redistrict is helping to establish school attendance zones.
A multidisciplinary faculty team
has garnered the Virginia Tech 2021 Alumni Award for Outreach Excellence for
developing and administering the Urban Computing (UrbComp) program that
trains graduate students in the latest methods of analyzing massive datasets to
study key issues facing urban populations while emphasizing ethical and
societal issues for practicing responsible data science.
The award, announced today by the university, accompanied by a $2,000 monetary award, is funded through the university’s Alumni Association and managed and administered by the Commission on Outreach and International Affairs.
Graphic is from the paper “Text-to-SQL Generation for Question Answering on Electronic Medical Records”
In 2016, Ping
Wang followed her advisor, Chandan Reddy,
from Wayne State University, where she received a master’s degree in computer
science, to Virginia Tech and the Sanghani Center.
Her area of interest is healthcare
systems, which are undergoing many changes in the era of big data.
“Advances in artificial intelligence and digitization in healthcare have enabled healthcare providers to effectively sift through tremendous amounts of medical information,” said Wang. “My first research project in this direction was about survival analysis and my advisor Dr. Reddy and other group members provided many useful suggestions and help at the initial stage. After further investigation, I found that there are still many unique challenges in the healthcare domain. I hope to leverage my expertise in data mining and machine learning to solve real-world challenges and advance healthcare applications.”
Graphic is from the paper “Self-Supervised Hyperboloid Representations Logical Queries over Knowledge Graphs”
Nurendra Choudhary was an applied science intern with the Amazon Search Team in Palo Alto, California, last summer where he worked on representation learning of products by leveraging the heterogeneous relations between them.
Jia’s research interest broadly spans the areas of machine learning, security, privacy, and cyber-physical systems. Her recent work focuses on building algorithmic foundations for data markets and developing trustworthy machine learning solutions. Towards that end, she and her group work on a range of projects, including data valuation and quality management, data privacy, active data acquisition, adversarial machine learning, and explainable machine learning.
Eldardiry, who earned a
master’s (2006) and PhD (2012) in computer science, in addition to an MBA
(2011), was recognized for “enormous contributions to artificial intelligence
and the computing research community at large.” Her research on
artificial intelligence has led to the development of AI and machine learning
that tackle complicated modern issues such as fraudulent medical claims, cyber
threat protection, and sensors that can assist with panic attacks.
She has
published over 35 peer-reviewed papers and holds 19 patents. She has managed
research projects for government and commercial sectors with her own share of
the awards exceeding $12 million.
Her other honors
include the Creative Young Engineer Award and the Xerox Innovation Group
Research Recognition Award for Advancing the Edge of Innovation.
Determined to support
tomorrow’s future scientists, Eldardiry has also served as a professional
mentor for the U.S. State Department TechWomen Program, a Bureau of
Educational and Cultural Affairs initiative to combine global business,
technology, and education power.
Graphic is from the paper “The Case For Alternative Web Archival Formats To Expedite The Data-To-Insight Cycle”
Xinyue
Wang was an undergraduate research assistant involved in artificial
intelligence and digital library research at the University of North Texas when
he had occasion to connect with Edward Fox, professor in Virginia Tech’s Department of Computer Science and faculty
at the Sanghani Center and Zhiwu Xie, a professor at University
Libraries.
The two are now Wang’s co-advisors as he pursues a Ph.D. in computer science at Virginia Tech. “They are wonderful people and I am grateful to be able to learn from them and work with them,” he said.
