News

Davon Woodard will spend the 2019 Fall academic semester as a visiting scholar at the University of the Witswatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa.

There, the Ph.D. student in the planning, governance, and globalization program in the School of Public and International Affairs and a research trainee in the National Science Foundation-sponsored Urban Computing (UrbComp) Certificate program administered through the Discovery Analytics Center, will conduct the first phase of research for his dissertation. He is comparing both online and offline social networks in two historically marginalized black communities — Johannesburg and Bronzeville in Chicago, Illinois — to get a better understanding of their structure, practices, and effects.  Click here to read more about Davon’s research on social networks.

Sneha Mehta has been selected to attend the Deep Learning and Reinforcement Learning Summer School (DLRLSS), from July 24 to August 2, in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada.

Mehta is a Ph.D. student in computer science at the Discovery Analytics Center, advised by Naren Ramakrishnan. In May, she began a summer internship as a data scientist at Netflix headquarters in Los Gatos, California, where she is researching novel methods to improve machine translation for subtitles.

“I applied to the Summer School because deep learning and reinforcement learning are very relevant to my work at problem solving both at DAC and at Netflix,” said Mehta. “Hearing directly from some of the pioneers in the field will be a great – and invaluable – experience.”

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Tanushree Mitra, assistant professor of computer science in the College of Engineering and a faculty member at the Discovery Analytics Center, has received a Social Media and Democracy Research Grant, giving her access to Facebook data to study how misinformation and other problematic content spread on the platform. This is the first time Facebook has given academics access to its data.

Mitra is among 60 international researchers — and one of only two women principal investigators — to receive the grant, funded by a number of leading foundations and administered through a Social Science One and Social Science Research Council collaborative partnership that bridges the gap between academics and the private sector.  Click here to read more about Mitra’s grant.

Jia-Bin Huang, assistant professor in the Bradley Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and a faculty member at the Discovery Analytics Center, has received a Google Faculty Research Award to support his work in detecting human-object interaction in images and videos.

The Google award, which is in the Machine Perception category, will allow Huang to tackle the challenges of detecting two aspects of human-object interaction: modeling the relationship between a person and relevant objects/scene for gathering contextual information and mining hard examples automatically from unlabeled but interaction-rich videos.  Click here to read more about Jia-Bin’s Google Award.

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:

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The Discovery Analytics Center is pleased to announce that five of their Ph.D. and four of their master’s degree students celebrated graduation from Virginia Tech last weekend at Commencement ceremonies in Blacksburg and in the National Capital Region.

“It is always bittersweet to bid our students farewell, but we wish them all the best. We know and appreciate how hard they have worked to achieve the high goals they set for themselves and look forward to following their successful careers in academia and industry,” said Naren Ramakrishnan, the Thomas L. Phillips Professor of Engineering and director of the center.

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Xinfeng Xu, a master’s student in the Discovery Analytics Center, received the Computer Science MS Research Award at the CS Awards Banquet last night.

The award recognizes the best MS thesis in CS with consideration to novelty of idea; quality of resulting publications; effectiveness of writing; and contributions/impact to the field overall.

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Why would a recommendation engine not suggest computer science classes to a female college student interested in that field of study?

According to Bert Huang, assistant professor of computer science in the College of Engineering and a faculty member at the Discovery Analytics Center, there are a few reasons. The engine may have trained from data representing the existing gender imbalance in computer science, unfair patterns may have inadvertently emerged from the mathematical nature of its learning algorithm and model, or there may be a less-visible or harder-to-detect process in place.  Click here to read more about Bert’s work.

School rezoning decisions often cause emotional stress for families and communities for a variety of reasons.

Parents worry about continuity of programs and activities at a new school, the toll it might take on their children’s friendships, and modes of transportation. School officials, administrators, and staff want to ensure that all students have equitable access to educational programs and facilities. Almost everyone is concerned about the impact a particular school attendance zone will have on traffic patterns, especially at opening and closing times.

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Payel Bandyopadhyay is trying to understand the role of 3D immersive environment (an artificial, interactive, computer-created scene or “world” within which a user can immerse themselves) for sensemaking in textual data.

According to Bandyopadhyay, prior work at Virginia Tech by her advisor Chris North and others has shown the part that 2D space plays in sensemaking. Her current research investigates 3D immersive environments to determine if they provide any additional benefit or not.

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