News

DAC and director, Naren Ramakrishnan, are featured as this month’s Virginia Tech​ Inventors of the Month by the Office of Research and Innovation for work in Early Model Based Event Recognition using Surrogates (EMBERS) software project.

EMBERS is a fully automated system for forecasting significant societal events, such as influenza-like illness case counts, rare disease outbreaks, civil unrest, domestic political crises, and elections, from open source surrogates. To read more about EMBERS click here.

Jessica Zeitz Self, DAC Ph.D. alumna who was was advised by Dr. Chris North, professor of Virginia Tech – Computer Science and associate director of DAC, discusses her experiences at Virginia Tech that allowed her to help decrease the gender gap of women in the field of computer science.

Self became a champion for diversity through efforts such as Women in Computing Day, an event that brings seventh-grade girls to Virginia Tech to learn about computer science in nontraditional ways. Click here to read more about Self’s work.

Congratulations to Liang Zhao, a recent DAC Ph.D. graduate in computer science, who has been named one of the Top 20 New Starts in Data Mining, provided by Microsoft searching. Liang was advised by Chang-Tien Lu, associate director of DAC and professor of computer science.

Microsoft searching mines the past six years of Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD) submissions and combines the big data from Microsoft to then achieve the ranking by an automatic algorithm. KDD is the top conference in the data mining area. Click here if you’d like to read more.

 

Congratulations to Scotland Leman, DAC faculty member and associate professor in the department of statistics, on receiving the W.J. Youden Award in Interlaboratory Testing. Dr. Leman was presented with the award at the 2016 Fall American Statistical Association Technical Conference. The award recognizes the authors of publications that make outstanding contributions to the design and/or analysis of interlaboratory tests or describe ingenious approaching to the planning and evaluation of data from such tests.  Click here to read more about the award.

DAC is collaborating with General Dynamics Mission Systems on an exciting venture that will help intelligence analysts find important information more quickly.  Chris North, associate director of DAC and professor of computer science, is leading the collaboration from the university side. North’s research group is developing a “smart” software that uses a visual interface and machine learning algorithms to allow the analyst’s interactions with the data to guide future searches. To read more about the partnership click here.

Congratulations to Chandan Reddy, our new DAC faculty member and associate professor of computer science for receiving an award from the National Science Foundation for his project EAGER: An Integrated Predictive Modeling Framework for Crowdfunding Environments.  

EAGER aims to study data analytics tools for improving crowdfunding project success rate. Crowdfunding provides seed capital for start-up companies, creating job opportunities and reviving lost business ventures. In spite of the widespread popularity and innovativeness in the concept of crowdfunding, however, many projects are still not able to succeed. A deeper understanding of the factors affecting investment decisions will not only give better success rate to the future projects but will also provide appropriate guidelines for project creators who will be seeking funding.  Click here to read more about Chandan’s project.

As part of DAC’s continued involvement in the Open Data, Open Jobs Initiative, we have collaborated with the Governor’s office in preparing for the Workforce Innovation Challenge held on Aug. 25 – 26.  The datathon is a part of the Governor’s New Virginia Economy initiative. The innovations expected to come out of the datathon will help the commonwealth gain a deeper understanding of the current and future job opportunities in today’s new economy.  DAC Ph.D student played a crucial role in preparing and harvesting the Open Jobs datasets used by participants in the datathon to develop apps. Click here to learn more about the datathon.  

Congratulations to Edward Fox, DAC faculty member and professor in the department of computer science on receiving Virginia Tech’s 2016 XCaliber Award.  Edward is being recognized for his extraordinary contributions to technology enriched active learning.  More specifically for his new computer science courses, CS 4984, Computational Linguistics and CS 5604, Informational Retrieval.  The XCaliber Award is given to faculty and staff who integrate technology in teaching and learning, celebrating innovative and student-centered teaching.  Click here to read more about the award.

DAC welcomes our new faculty member, Chandan Reddy, who was appointed to associate professor in the Department of Computer Science.  Chandan is joining us from Wayne State University where he was the director of the Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery (DMKD) Laboratory.  His primary research interests are data mining and machine learning with applications to healthcare analytics, social network analysis and bioinformatics.  Chandan is joined by two Ph.D. students, Ping Wang and Tian Shi.  Click here to learn more about Chandan.

Governor of Virginia Terry McAuliffe’s office has sent out a press release announcing Open Data, Open Jobs; a groundbreaking data analytics initiative to better connect job seekers to job opportunities.  DAC Ph.D. student Rupinder Paul Khandpur has been working on this project via the Governor’s Big Data Internship Program (GDIP), a part of the Governor’s New Virginia Economy Workforce Initiative.  The project is an initiative of the Commonwealth Center for Advanced Research and Statistics (CCARs), a virtual center for modeling innovation approaches for improving and using labor market, workforce, and education data. To read more about Open Data, Open Jobs click here.