News

About the series: Every complex problem has many multidisciplinary angles. Leveraging expertise and energy, Virginia Tech faculty and students serve humanity by addressing the world’s most difficult problems.

With risk of political and targeted violence on the rise across the United States, national and local leaders are asking Princeton University’s nonpartisan Bridging Divides Initiative (BDI) to provide them with more timely, reliable, and context-specific data on targeted violence events that could help them engage locally and better inform their policy decisions. 

As part of their response to this plea, BDI’s team of Princeton social scientists collaborated with data scientists at the Sanghani Center for Artificial Intelligence and Data Analytics to identify targeted violence events. These often include hate crimes and other incidents that target individuals because of their race, religion, sexual orientation, or other perceived characteristics. Click here to read more about this research.

The Sanghani Center for Artificial Intelligence and Data Analytics welcomes new faculty member Ismini Lourentzou, who joined the Virginia Tech Department of Computer Science as assistant professor in the Spring 2021 semester.

Lourentzou most recently served as a research scientist at IBM Almaden Research Center where she worked on machine learning, natural language processing, and information retrieval problems. In 2019, she was recognized with an IBM Invention Achievement Award and was selected to participate in Rising Stars in EECS.

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The Association for Computing Machinery Special Interest Group on Information Retrieval (ACM SIGIR) has announced that Edward Fox, professor in the Virginia Tech Department of Computer Science and faculty at the Sanghani Center for Artificial Intelligence and Data Analytics, is one of 25 inductees from across the globe in its inaugural SIGIR Academy. 

The inaugural academy inductees, drawn from academia, industry, and beyond, are principal leaders in information retrieval whose significant contributions have shaped the discipline or industry. Click here to read more about Edward’s inauguration.

Xiaolong Li is a Ph.D. student in computer engineering. His main interest is in computer vision, with a focus on deep 3D representations learning for dynamic scene understanding. 

“Building robust smart algorithms will help machines understand the 3D world around us,” Li said.

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Ph.D. student Jesse Harden’s current research is focused on large, high-resolution displays and their use in and benefits for data science.

“I am particularly interested in how we can better design software for large displays for data science. And in the future, I hope to look into how machine learning can be used to improve interactions with large screen UIs for both individual and collaborative use scenario,” said Harden, whose concentration in this area was influenced by reading the past works of his advisor, Chris North, and through their subsequent discussions.

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Having earned two bachelor of science degrees, one in mathematics and one in engineering, and a master’s degree in informatics, all from UniversidadCatólica del Norte, Chile, Brian Keith was looking for a flexible Ph.D. program. The Virginia Tech Department of Computer Science provided that flexibility and led him to the Sanghani Center where interdisciplinary data science is a key focus.

In his Ph.D. research, Keith, co-advised by Chris North and Tanushree Mitra —  is exploring online information narratives, in particular, how to represent, extract, and visualize them. He is also analyzing the issue of how misinformation spreads in these narratives.

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According to Yali Bian, the Sanghani Center’s proclivity for encouraging interdisciplinary research is an added benefit while working on his dissertation topic, “Interactive Deep Learning for Semantic Interaction.” It encompasses several different research areas like human computer interaction, deep learning, visual analytics, and explainable AI. 

Bian is exploring ways to provide user-friendly interactive visualization systems to users unfamiliar with deep learning so that they can make full usage of powerful deep learning models.

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When Bipasha Banerjee was looking for a Ph.D. program she had one major criteria: it had to give the highest importance to research. With her continuing passion for knowing more, she wanted to delve deeper into open questions and learn how to solve them.

“The quality of research in computer science at Virginia Tech is unparalleled and professors associated with the Sanghani Center are involved in projects that encompass a large range of real-world issues,” said Banerjee. “I realized this was the right fit for me and, thankfully I was accepted and started an exciting journey of research.”

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Po-Han Chen, a master’s degree student in computer science, was on the research team for the paper, “RISECURE: Metro Incidents And Threat Detection Using Social Media,” that appeared in the proceedings of the 2020 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining (ASONAM) held virtually in December.

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Subhodip Biswas is the recipient of the Journeyman Fellowship through the DEVCOM Army Research Laboratory (ARL) Research Associateship Program (RAP) administered by the Oak Ridge Associated Universities (ORAU). This fellowship will provide Biswas the opportunity to work on Bayesian optimization techniques for automated machine learning (AutoML) and robust AI systems.

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