Amit Naik was a master’s student in the Department of Computer Science. His advisor was Chris North. Naik’s interests lie in big data, data visualization, analysis and machine learning.

Shane Bookhultz is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Statistics. His advisor is Scotland Leman. Bookhultz’s  research interests are in detecting polarizing and potential high impact areas form spatial-time topic modeling. Through social media data scraping, his research shows how many topics can be diffused at different speeds and intensity over time.

Gloria Kang and Huthaifa Ashqar recently earned doctorates from Virginia Tech in totally different fields, but they have something in common — cross-disciplinary training to solve today’s tough urban challenges. Kang and Ashqar are the first graduates of the National Science Foundation-sponsored urban computing certificate program. Both are planning to walk at the December commencement ceremony in Blacksburg. […]

Naren Ramakrishnan, professor of computer science in the College of Engineering at Virginia Tech and director of the Discovery Analytics Center, was reappointed as the Thomas L. Phillips Professor of Engineering by Virginia Tech President Tim Sands and Interim Executive Vice President and Provost Cyril Clarke. Click here to read more about Naren’s reappointment.

Anuj Karpatne is an associate professor in the Department of Computer Science at Virginia Tech and core faculty at the Sanghani Center. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota with Vipin Kumar in September 2017.  Following graduation, he was a postdoc with Kumar until joining Virginia Tech in August 2018. His research explores […]

Sneha Mehta was a Ph.D. student in the Department of Computer Science and her advisor was Naren Ramakrishnan. Mehta’s research interests are data mining and deep learning, especially for natural language processing applications. Specifically, Mehta is interested in learning representations for natural language understanding and multi-task learning for generalizable natural language processing (NLP).

Subhodip Biswas was a Ph. D. student in the Department of Computer Science. He was advised by Naren Ramakrishnan. His research interests are spatial data mining, geographic information systems, education, and crowdsourcing. Biswas was an NSF research trainee in the UrbComp program and earned the graduate certificate. Biswas worked on a crowdsourcing and analytics system, Redistrict, […]

The relevance of Tanushree Mitra’s research and its socio-psychological aspect attracted Shruti Phadke to the Discovery Analytics Center in Fall 2017 while she was earning a master’s degree in computer science at Virginia Tech. “I have always been inclined to work in interdisciplinary fields so the opportunity to work with Dr. Mitra seemed like a […]

What do online conspiracy theorists discuss; what are the recurring elements in these conversations; and what do they tell us about the way people think? As Tanushree Mitra, assistant professor of computer science and a faculty member at the Discovery Analytics Center, and Mattia Samory, a post doc in the Department of Computer Science, set out to find answers, they […]

After graduating with a bachelor’s degree in computer science from Webster University, Khoa Doan entered the workforce. For the next few years, he held positions as a software developer and data engineer in the advertising industry and at NASA and gained experience processing large datasets.