Congratulations to Aditya Prakash on his Facebook Faculty Award, one of only 10 such awards given this year! The award will support novel information diffusion related research focusing on understanding, predicting and countering virality on social-media websites and platforms. For example, some of the questions Aditya will study include: “What content could go viral? How much and when? Given a context, how to identify and counter negative viral campaigns?” Look forward to exciting results from this research!

Congratulations to Saurav Ghosh! The DAC/CS Ph.D. student co-authored SourceSeer: Forecasting Rare Disease Outbreaks Using Multiple Data Sources“, which garnered the Best Paper Award at the SIAM International Conference on Data Mining held in Vancouver, Canada.

Continue reading…

DAC Assistant Professors Dhruv Batra and Devi Parikh discuss their Visual Question Answering (VQA) project with students from thier Computer Vision Lab

DAC faculty members and assistant professors of electrical and computer engineering, Devi Parikh and Dhruv Batra’s project on artificial intelligence in collaboration with Microsoft, Visual Question Answering (VQA), was featured in Bloomberg Business. Visual Question Answering is a new dataset containing open-ended questions about images. The system takes an image as an input and a question about that image, then produces an answer as an output.  To read more of the article click here.

DAC faculty members Devi Parikh and Dhruv Batra, assistant professors of electrical engineering received Outstanding New Assistant Professor Awards.  They were presented with the awards at the eighteenth annual Virginia Tech College of Engineering faculty reception.  They were awarded for teaching innovation, research, service, and outreach for 2015.  To read more about their awards click here. 

In the online, big data world, it’s important to be able to separate the wheat from the chaff. This is true when it comes to refining search results and culling a Twitter feed, and it’s true with photographs, too. Dhruv Batra’s latest innovation recently posted to arXiv.org takes advantage of all sorts of social and technological cues to figure out who really matters in an image. “We have the ability to look at a scene and, just by coding what people are doing, how people are looking at each other, we can get a sense of the important actors,” says Dhruv Batra, a professor of electrical and computer engineering and creator of the program, along with graduate student and lead designer Clint Solomon Mathialagan and Andrew Gallagher, an engineer at Google. Read more. 

One of the many protests against the 2014 World Cup in Sao Paulo, May 15, 2014.

Newsweek profiles the Discovery Analytics Center’s EMBERS Project, which is funded by IARPA.  EMBERS offers a glimpse into just how much “big data” has changed the game by magnifying the U.S. intelligence community’s ability to forecast—with phenomenal accuracy—human behavior on a global scale by scouring Twitter, YouTube, Wikipedia, Tumblr, Tor, Facebook and more. EMBERS is using algorithms and a variety of advanced tools to sort through dense and complex information for patterns in the chaos—patterns that frequently point to events before they happen, such as civil uprisings, disease outbreaks, humanitarian crises, mass migrations, protests, riots, political routs, even violence. Click here to read more.

Soldiers with the Spanish flu are hospitalized inside the U. of Kentucky gym in 1918. In one prevention method examined in a new study, New Yorkers were advised to refrain from kissing “except through a handkerchief.”

An article in the Chronicle of Higher Education today highlights possibilities in interdisciplinary research between data analysts and humanities researchers. It showcases DAC’s Digging into Data project as a “model-in-progress for how data-driven analysis and close reading can enhance each other”. The research focuses on several questions: How did reporting on the Spanish flu spread in 1918? And how big a role did one influential person play in shaping how the outbreak was handled? Read More

Congratulations to DAC/CS PhD Student Sathappan Muthiah on receiving Deployed Application Award at IAAI (Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence) 2015 for his paper “Planned Protest Modeling in News and Social Media“. The CS department also recognized his work with a Pratt fellowship for Spring 2015 – Congratulations twice!

Chang-Tien Lu, associate director of DAC and associate professor of computer science has been awarded a $300,000 subcontract from the United States Army Research Office and United States Army Engineer Research and Development Center.  He will use the grant to develop an automated tool to make sense of data captured in news articles, tweets, images, and audio and video streams.

Naren Ramarkishnan, director of DAC and professor of computer science along with Ing-Ray Chen, also a professor of computer science are co-principle investigators of the grant.  They will help Lu oversee the projects research.  To read more about grant click here.