News

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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The Discovery Analytics Center continually brings together computer scientists, engineers, and statisticians to meet the research and workforce needs of today’s data-driven society. This fall, DAC welcomes two new faculty to bolster its strengths in information retrieval, data mining, human-computer interaction, and information science.

The two new faculty members are Jiepu Jiang and Anuj Karpatne, both assistant professors in the Department of Computer Science.

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Chen Gao traveled to Newcastle, United Kingdom, last month to present a paper on human-object interaction at the 29th British Machine Vision Conference, a major international conference on computer vision and related areas held in the UK.

Gao is a first-year Ph.D. student in the Bradley Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. After graduating with a master’s degree in electrical and computer engineering from the University of Michigan Ann Arbor in April 2017, Gao came to Virginia Tech as a visiting research assistant to work with Jia-Bin Huang. It was this experience that sparked his interest in the university’s Ph.D. program. Huang, a faculty member at the Discovery Analytics Center, is now his advisor.

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Chris North, associate director of the Discovery Analytics Center, and Ph.D. students Michelle Dowling and John Wenskovitch will be in Berlin, Germany, from Oct. 21 to 26, attending the 2018 IEEE VIS Conference.

In addition to presenting their research, the three are organizers of a conference workshop: Machine Learning from User Interaction for Visualization and Analytics.

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