News

Discovery Analytics Center faculty Bert Huang and Chandan Reddy and two Ph.D. students were in Honolulu, Hawaii, last week, sharing their research with attendees at the Thirty-Third AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence.

Chidubem Arachie and You Lu, both in the Department of Computer Science, presented spotlight talks on studies they collaborated on with Huang, who is their advisor. The studies were also included in a poster session.

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Joseph Weissman graduated from Virginia Tech in May 2018 with triple majors — mathematics, physics, and Computational Modeling and Data Analytics (CMDA).

“I really gravitated toward the machine learning side of my CMDA classes,” Weissman said. “And because I wanted to learn more about networks, I took Dr. Sengupta’s class on the subject during my last semester.”

His final project for the class evolved into the research project he is now working on as a master’s student at the Discovery Analytics Center, where he is advised by Srijan Sengupta.

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MD Momen Bhuiyan, a Ph.D. student in computer science at the Discovery Analytics Center, is focusing his research on social computing. He is currently working on news consumption issues in relation to social media, trying to solve problems of fake news through computation and design.

“The problem of fake news is endemic in our social feeds,” Bhuiyan said. “As a solution, I am using design as a way of helping users identify problematic information sources.”

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To help physicians decrease the number of deaths resulting from traumatic brain injuries, Chandan Reddy, associate professor in the Department of Computer Science and faculty at the Discovery Analytics Center,  will use new machine learning techniques for computational models to predict short- and long-term outcomes, categorize traumatic brain injury patients, and provide interventions tailored to a specific patient and his or her injury. This four-year study is funded by a National Science Foundation grant in excess of $1 million. Click here too read more about the grant.

Gloria Kang and Huthaifa Ashqar recently earned doctorates from Virginia Tech in totally different fields, but they have something in common — cross-disciplinary training to solve today’s tough urban challenges.

Kang and Ashqar are the first graduates of the National Science Foundation-sponsored urban computing certificate program. Both are planning to walk at the December commencement ceremony in Blacksburg.

Administered through the Discovery Analytics Center, the program trains students across disciplines in the latest methods in analyzing massive datasets to study key issues concerning urban populations.  Click here to read more about Gloria and Huthaifa.

Naren Ramakrishnan, professor of computer science in the College of Engineering at Virginia Tech and director of the Discovery Analytics Center, was reappointed as the Thomas L. Phillips Professor of Engineering by Virginia Tech President Tim Sands and Interim Executive Vice President and Provost Cyril Clarke. Click here to read more about Naren’s reappointment.

The relevance of Tanushree Mitra’s research and its socio-psychological aspect attracted Shruti Phadke to the Discovery Analytics Center in Fall 2017 while she was earning a master’s degree in computer science at Virginia Tech.

“I have always been inclined to work in interdisciplinary fields so the opportunity to work with Dr. Mitra seemed like a perfect fit for me,” said Phadke.

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What do online conspiracy theorists discuss; what are the recurring elements in these conversations; and what do they tell us about the way people think?

As Tanushree Mitra, assistant professor of computer science and a faculty member at the Discovery Analytics Center, and Mattia Samory, a post doc in the Department of Computer Science, set out to find answers, they turned to Reddit, a social media platform of thousands of smaller communities or “subreddits” connecting users with similar interests. Click here to read more about Tanu’s research.

After graduating with a bachelor’s degree in computer science from Webster University, Khoa Doan entered the workforce. For the next few years, he held positions as a software developer and data engineer in the advertising industry and at NASA and gained experience processing large datasets.

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Generating new music inspired by existing music datasets is a major area of interest for Zhiqian “Danny” Chen, a Ph.D. student at the Discovery Analytics Center.

“Music, with its complex hierarchical and sequential structure and its inherent emotional and aesthetic subjectivity, is an intriguing research subject at the core of human creativity,” said Chen. “And because of rapid advances in data-driven algorithms such as deep learning, exploring computational creativity via machine learning approaches is increasingly popular.”

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