Reports that medical errors are the third leading cause of death in the United States have led the Institute of Medicine and several state legislatures to suggest that data from patient safety event reporting systems could help health care providers better understand safety hazards and, ultimately, improve patient care. “Tens of thousands of these safety […]
In disease control and prevention, understanding how an emerging infectious disease can spread beyond the visible network is important. Marketers posting ads on an online social network can benefit from knowing how their information will spread beyond ego networks. These two scenarios provide good examples for practical application of Shuangfei Fan’s research using deep representation […]
Motivated to improve the health and quality of urban environments through new data sources and methods, Fanglan Chen is simultaneously pursuing a Ph.D. in computer science and a master’s degree in urban planning. Additionally, she plans to earn a graduate certificate in Data Analytics, offered through the Discovery Analytics Center. She already holds a graduate certificate […]
Alexander Rodriguez was a master’s degree student in data science at the University of Oklahoma when he met B. Aditya Prakash at the 2017 ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining. That meeting sealed his decision to apply to the Ph.D. computer science program at Virginia Tech. “I was excited about the problems he […]
After receiving a master’s degree in computer science at Fall Commencement, Alyssa Herbst will head to New York City. She has already accepted a position as software engineer at Instagram, where she interned on the Shopping Machine Learning team this past summer. Herbst’s interest in machine learning sparked when, as an undergrad in the Department […]
Mahmud Shahriar Hossain was recently promoted to associate professor of computer science, with tenure, at the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP). He leads the university’s Discovery Analytics Lab. Hossain earned his Ph.D. in computer science from Virginia Tech in 2012 and joined UTEP as an assistant professor in 2013. While at the Discovery […]
“Working with text data is challenging but that is what I like about it,” said Shane Bookhultz, a Ph.D. student in the Department of Statistics. “It is inherently noisy because of different mannerisms, choices of words, and tones. Unlike numerical data, which is pretty concrete, text data can have various interpretations.” Bookhultz — who is […]
Jianfeng He is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Computer Science. He is advised by Chang Tien-Lu. His research focus is on computer vision centers on guided image editing. He also focuses on natural language processing, studying uncertainty analysis in its applications (e.g., text classification, few-shot learning, named entity recognition, and text summarization).
Along his educational path, Jianfeng He learned an important lesson: Having a good advisor should be the number one priority in choosing a Ph.D. program. The opportunity to work with Chang-Tien Lu drew him to Virginia Tech and the Discovery Analytics Center after spending a short period of time at another university. He’s focus is […]
Aditya Prakash, associate professor of computer science and faculty at the Discovery Analytics Center has moved from Blacksburg to DAC’s location at the Virginia Tech Research Center – Arlington. “My work is frequently motivated by public health, urban computing, and web-related problems and this location is fertile ground for collaborations in these domains,” Prakash said. […]