News

Anuj Karpatne, an assistant professor of computer science and a Discovery Analytics Center faculty member, has been named the 2019 Intelligent Systems and Geoscience (IS-GEO) inaugural Fellow.

The announcement was made by Suzanne Pierce, a research scientist at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) and principal investigator for the IS-GEO Research Coordination Network, during the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) conference in Washington, D.C., today.

“I am pleased to announce the IS-GEO Fellows Program,” Pierce said. “The program is designed to support researchers as they commit to in-depth projects to accelerate discoveries. Dr. Karpatne was selected because of his expertise in scientific theory{or physics}-guided machine learning. Throughout his fellowship year, he will evaluate applied machine learning approaches to Earth datasets for the energy industry.”

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Bijaya Adhikari, a Ph.D. student in computer science, was attracted to the Discovery Analytics Center by the opportunity to solve data mining problems that are not only theoretically interesting, but have real-world applications, as well.

Adhikari’s core research focuses on graph mining and topics relating to social network analysis, such as community detection, immunization, influence maximization, and information. His interests also lie in machine learning, theoretical computer science, and algorithms.

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Current Virginia Tech graduate students Mohammed Almannaa, Fanglan Chen, and Swapna Thorve have earned the Urban Computing (UrbComp) certificate, a cross disciplinary program sponsored by the National Science Foundation and led by the Discovery Analytics Center.

The program is a collaboration between eight departments and five colleges and trains students to use both foundational and applied aspects of data science to help solve problems related to urban issues like transportation, affordable housing, and policing.

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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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