News

Great coverage of DAC Ph.D. student Yaser Keneshloo’s research in collaboration with the Washington Post on applying data science to predict the popularity of news articles.  Keneshloo and the Post are working on a popularity prediction experiment, they are doing clickstream analysis and producing a pipeline for processing tens of millions of daily clicks, for thousands of articles. Click here to read more about Keneshloo’s project.

 

 

Congratulations to Chandan Reddy, DAC faculty member and associate professor of Virginia Tech – Computer Science, whose paper in collaboration with Korea University, Boosted L-EnsNMF: Local Topic Discovery via Ensemble of Nonnegative Matrix Factorization, received the Best Student Paper Award at the IEEE Conference on Data Mining! Click here for a full list of awards.

DAC PhD student Saurav Ghosh’s work was published in Nature Scientific Reports. His research explores relationships between news coverage and modeling of infectious disease outbreaks

The research is in collaboration with Boston Children’s Hospital and University of Washington, Seattle. Click here to read more about Ghosh’s research.

Walid Saad, assistant professor in electrical and computer engineering, and Naren Ramakrishnan, and professor of computer science and director of DAC, are leading a $324,000 U.S. Army Research Laboratory grant that is laying groundwork for the Internet of Battlefield Things.

They are developing a planning framework that would present mathematical tools to understand how to transform existing battlefield capabilities into a large-scale IoBT. Click here to read more about the project.

DAC has been recognized for its contributions in a project focused on workforce analytics for Governor Terry McAuliffe’s Open Data, Open Jobs portal.  DAC is playing a key role in the governor’s commitment to improving the labor market in Virginia.

Open Data, Open Jobs is a real-time curation, analysis, and visualization of advertised job postings in Virginia. All curated jobs are published on the DAC’s open data portal, accessible through a publicly available API in machine-readable format, with a unified job posting schema that eliminates the need to navigate separate public and private listings dispersed across multiple sites, such as Monster or LinkedIn.

DAC was on-board from the onset, providing necessary support to harvest, clean, and enrich individual datasets to create the new workforce data product. The dataset was created in large part by DAC Ph.D. student, Rupinder Paul Khandpur, who was also in the governor’s data internship program. Click here to read more about the Open Data, Open Jobs project.

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.