News

As the dust settles from graduation, DAC would like to recognize the students who have graduated this year.  DAC is proud to have had eight graduate students complete their degrees this spring semester; seven of which received a Ph.D. and one receiving a Master’s of Science. Below we highlight our students who are now prepared to assume roles as faculty members, researchers, and data analysts. We look forward to their contribution to the field data science and cannot wait to see what they achieve from here. Congratulations!

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Congratulations to DAC associate director, Chang-Tien Lu, who has been promoted to full professor in the department of computer science.  Dr. Lu is an ACM Distinguished Scientist.  His research focuses on data management to fulfill emerging requirements for storing, analyzing, and visualizing spatial data. To read more about this years promotions, click here.

Congratulations to Edward Fox, professor of computer science and DAC faculty member, who is among a group of Virginia Tech researchers collaborating with Virginia Tech Libraries that has recently been awarded a $308, 175 National Leadership Grant for Libraries from the Institute of Museum and Library Services.  The team will be exploring effective ways of storing and reusing bid data.

 

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Bert Huang, DAC faculty member and assistant professor of computer science, presented a poster at the Computer Computing Consortium Symposium on Addressing National Priorities and Societal Needs.  Dr. Huang presented his research on machine learning for cyberbullying, specifically weakly supervised cyberbullying detecting in social media. Click here to watch a video of his presentation.

 

DAC is proud to announce that we will now be offering a new graduate certificate in data analytics.  The certificate is offered collaboratively by Virginia Tech’s departments of computer science, statistics, and electrical and computer engineering.  The 12-credit program will be open to students both in Blacksburg and the National Capital Region.  It will better prepare students for careers in data analytics and data science, one of the nation’s fastest growing fields.  For more information about our certificate in data analytics, click here.

DAC Director Naren Ramakrishnan gave the opening keynote talk at the Pacific Asia Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining Conference on April 20, which was held in Auckland, New Zealand this year.  Dr. Ramakrishnan provided overview and perspectives about DAC’s EMBERS project aimed at a data mining audience. To learn more about the conference, click here.

DAC Director Naren Ramakrishnan guest edits IEEE Computer’s April 2016 issue, which is focused on Big Data.  Dr. Ramakrishnan guested edited along with Ravi Kumar from Google.  Read the issue to explore the latest in databases, algorithms, and applications of big data here.

DAC, in collaboration with Virginia Tech’s Office of Economic Development, is taking part in an important study to measure the Roanoke and Blacksburg region’s growth in entrepreneurship. DAC will provide an analysis of entrepreneurs’ social-media use in the hopes of promoting jobs and entrepreneurship in the region. To read more about the study, click here.

DAC was happy to participate again this year at the local science and engineering fairs. Brian Goode, DAC research scientist, served as a judge at the Northern Virginia Science and Engineering Fair at Wakefield High School in Arlington. To read more about Virginia Tech’s involvement in the science fair, click here.

DAC faculty members Devi Parikh and Dhruv Batra interview wit WVTF Public Radio and RADIO IQ to discuss their leading efforts in the‪ artificial intelligence community. Parikh and Batra shared insight into their Visual Question and Answering (VQA) project, which tackles the next frontier in artificial intelligence, which is teaching computers to ‘see,’ that is, to recognize unique objects the way humans do. To hear Parikh and Batra’s interview, click here.