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 […]
Transpose, a new Seattle startup that bills itself as a holistic information management platform, today announced a $1.5 million funding round. Transpose is the brainchild of Samah Gad, DAC (CS) PhD graduate and Hussein Ahmed also a CS PhD graduate. Formerly known as KustomNote, the nine-person company has developed software that helps customers create structure and […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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, […]
As featured in the Big Data Journal: “Forecasting has long been a mystic art with techniques shrouded in mystery. Approaches from big data and machine learning are now revolutionizing the science of predictive analytics. The EMBERS system has been producing early warnings of civil unrest across Latin America for over two years. In February 2014, […]
Devi Parikh, assistant professor in the department of electrical and computer engineering and DAC faculty member received close to $1 million “to teach machines to use ‘common sense’ in image analysis.” Parikh, who leads the Computer Vision Lab at Virginia Tech, is the recipient of the Allen Distinguished Investigator Award from the Paul G. Allen Family […]