News

Devi Parikh, DAC faculty member and assistant professor of the department of electrical and computer engineering received the Office of Naval Research Young Investigators Award, one of the oldest and most selective scientific research advancement programs in the country!

Parikh is being recognized for her exceptionally creative research which holds promise across a range of naval-relevant science and technology areas. Click here to read more about her award.

 

DAC associate director, Chris North, along with other Virginia Tech researchers led by Joseph Gabbard, associate professor in the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, received a grant from Microsoft for the amount of $100,000.  The grant will be used to explore the potential uses of its HoloLens devices for advancing research in the area of mixed reality and the possibilities of holographic computing. The team of researchers includes faculty from theInstitute for Creativity, Arts, and Technology and the Center for Human-Computer Interaction.  To read more about this grant click here.

The Washington Post director for Big Data and Personalization, Sam Han, discussed the Post’s collaboration with DAC at the Predictive Analytics Innovation Summit in San Diego this past weekend.  Yaser Keneshloo, DAC Ph.D. student, has been working with the Post on improving user experience by predicting the popularity of a news article.  His work allows editors to prioritize stories, identify under-performing articles for content variable testing, and supports advertising opportunities.  To read more about Sam Han’s presentation click here. 

Devi Parikh, DAC faculty member and assistant professor in the department of electrical and computer engineering received a National Science Foundation (NSF) Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) award for her Visual Question Answering (VQA) research, a system of using images to teach a computer to respond to any question that might be asked. The CAREER grant is NSF’s most prestigious award, given to junior faculty members who are expected to become academic leaders in their field.  To read more about Parikh’s award click here.

DAC faculty members and assistant professors of ECE, Devi Parikh and Dhruv Batra’s project on Learning Common Sense through Visual Abstractions was featured in Newsweek. The article focuses on an artificial intelligence algorithm they trained to understand and predict visual humor, representing a major development towards creating “common sense” machines.  Read more about Devi and Dhruv’s algorithm here.

Chang-Tein Lu, Associate Director of DAC and Associate Professor of Computer Science became an Association for Computing Machinery Distinguished Scientist.  ACM is the world’s leading association of computing professionals. As a distinguished member, Chang-Tein, is recognized as an innovative leader in the field of computing.  To read more about ACM click here.

 

Chang-Tien Lu, associate professor of computer science and associate director of DAC is leading Virginia Tech as it takes part in a multi-university effort to apply big data solutions to regional challenges. Chang-Tien will be playing a vital role in the university’s broad-base collaboration on the project, an initiative supported by the National Science Foundation that brings together research universities across the south to develop a Big Data Regional Innovation Hub.  Read more about Chang-Tien’s part in this project here.

Chris North, professor of computer science and associate director of DAC, and Kurt Luther, assistant professor of computer science were awarded a $500,000 grant from NSF over three years from its cyber-human system program area.  The grant focuses on using crowdsourcing to help analyze big data and solve problems. Crowdsourcing, in this sense, means soliciting contributions of data from a large group of people, most of whom are online users. To read more about Kurt and Chris’s project click here.

Lenwood Heath, a professor of computer science and faculty member of DAC is of a part group of faculty members at Virginia Tech awarded a five-year $3.6 million Partnerships in International Research and Education (PIRE) grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) that is aimed at mitigating the global threat of antibiotic resistance spread through the contact or consumption of contaminated water.  Disease free water is a global health challenge that commands an international team effort.  To read more about this project click here.