Our talented team has been recognized with many competitive research awards and featured in major news and media outlets such as the Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, the Boston Globe and the Chronicle of Higher Education.
“You have to work every day at being the best you can be. It is a project that is never-ending.”
These are Raja Phanindra Chava’s own words — and his inspiration — as he pursues an M.S. in computer engineering.
“I believe that learning is a constant process throughout life to achieve excellence,” said Chava, “and it is my primary driving force.”
DAC Ph.D. student, Yuliang Zou
Do you think working with image and video would make an interesting career?
Yuliang Zou definitely does. The first-year Ph.D. student — who would like to join the research arm of a major company one day — is researching computer vision, trying to teach computers to analyze and think like a human when they are given visual data like still images, RGB-D data, or video sequences.
Students and judges at 2018 Data Ethics Case Competition are (front row) Rob Day, Techlab; Stacey Clifton; and Matt Slifko; (back row) Rich Wokutch, professor of management; Davon Woodard; and John Grant, Palantir.
Three Ph.D. students in the Urban Computing Certificate (UrbComp) program decided that the 2018 Data Ethics Case Competition would be a good way to apply what they have been learning in one of the program’s courses, GRAD 5134: Ethics and Professionalism in Data Science, this spring.
So they teamed up to enter the competition, sponsored by the Center for Business Intelligence & Analytics, which bridges classroom learning with a real-life situation and important questions for the future and encourages diverse trans-disciplinary teams.
UrbComp Ph.D. students, left to right top, Nikhil Muralidhar and Gloria Kang; bottom, Stacey Clifton and Davon Woodard
As increasing numbers of people move to cities and become more wired and networked, Ph.D. students across various academic disciplines at Virginia Tech are joining together to focus on how data science can help them find solutions to urban problems. Click here to learn more about these students and their research.
DAC Ph.D. student, Xuchao Zhang
In the era of data explosion, noise and corruption in real-world data caused by accidental outliers, transmission loss, or even adversarial data attacks is inevitable and often results in incorrect data labeling. For example, a negative review in the Internet Movie Database (IMDb) could be mislabeled as positive or an image of a panda might be mislabeled as a gibbon.
Xuchao Zhang, a Ph.D. student in computer science, is focused on solving the problem of mislabeling.
DAC Ph.D. student, Elaheh Raisi
Elaheh Raisi’s enthusiasm for math dates back to high school. So it was not surprising when Raisi chose applied mathematics as her major at the Amirkabir University of Technology -Tehran Polytechnic.
“I realized early on that mathematics is essential for many practical sciences,” said Raisi. “My aim was to gain a strong knowledge of mathematics that I could use in problem solving.”
During her freshman year Raisi concentrated on mathematics and programming-related courses but after taking some computer science classes, she developed an interest in artificial intelligence. She earned a master’s degree in artificial intelligence at the Science and Research branch of the Islamic Azad University.
Jonathan Baker, DAC Ph.D. student
Jonathan Baker earned a master’s degree in computational and applied math at Rice University in Houston, Texas, in 2015.
When Mark Embree, one of his professors at Rice, returned to his alma mater in Blacksburg to lead the Computational Modeling and Data Analytics program in the College of Science Academy of Integrated Science, Baker did not hesitate to follow him.
“Once I decided that I wanted to pursue a Ph.D. in math,” he said. “I knew the only professor I wanted to continue down that path with was Mark Embree.”
Screenshot of LCPS map on the crowdsourcing website Biswas created.
Subhodip Biswas, DAC Ph.D. student
The omnipresent activity of school redistricting is driving Ph.D, student Subhodip Biswas’s research at the Discovery Analytics Center.
“Through blogs and news articles, I became aware that school redistricting happens in some US public school systems almost every year,” said Biswas, who earned a bachelor ‘s degree in electronics and telecommunication engineering from Jadavpur University in India in 2014. “It was fascinating to learn how numerous considerations go into designing new school zones.”
B. Aditya Prakash, assistant professor in The Department of Computer Science has received the prestigious Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award from the National Science Foundation to find data-driven network strategies to enhance national security and public health. Click here to read ore about Aditya’s award.
DAC M.S. student Jeff Roberston
Jeff Robertson grew up in Blacksburg and is the fifth Hokie in his family. “So, it was not difficult for me to choose Virginia Tech,” he said.
Working towards a master’s degree in computer science applications, Robertson’s current research is part of the Fun GCAT project in collaboration with the Biocomplexity Institute of Virginia Tech.
Within that larger program, his focus is on developing a new tool that can efficiently index and search massive biological data sets.