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Payel Bandyopadhyay, DAC Ph.D. student computer science

Payel Bandyopadhyay is trying to understand the role of 3D immersive environment (an artificial, interactive, computer-created scene or “world” within which a user can immerse themselves) for sensemaking in textual data.

According to Bandyopadhyay, prior work at Virginia Tech by her advisor Chris North and others has shown the part that 2D space plays in sensemaking. Her current research investigates 3D immersive environments to determine if they provide any additional benefit or not.

“When I started my Ph.D. in computer science, I was looking for a topic at the cutting edge of visualization research,” she said. “Dr. North helped me be a part of this project and I am very intrigued by it. His expertise in the information visualization field is one of the reasons I was drawn to the Discovery Analytics Center, where I can work at the intersection of human computer interaction and analytics.”

Bandyopadhyay earned a master’s degree in computer science from the University of Helsinki, Finland, specializing in networking and services. While earning her master’s degree, she worked as a full-time graduate assistant.

Springer has published two of her studies — “Navigating Complex Information Spaces: A Portfolio Theory Approach,” at the 2015 International Workshop on Symbiotic Interaction, on which Bandyopadhyay was first author, and “User Model in a Box: Cross-System User Model Transfer for Resolving Cold Start Problems,” at the 2015 User Modeling, Adaptation and Personalization (UMAP) conference, on which she was a collaborator.

In Summer 2018, she interned with the Advanced Technology Group at UPS headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia, where she worked on building several data visualization tools for UPSers, the official feed for UPS employees and fans. As of this writing, she is planning to intern at UPS again this summer.

Bandyopadhyay, who cites swimming, hiking, and dancing among her favorite spare time activities, is projected to graduate in May 2021 and hopes to continue research in academia or industry.

Michelle Dowling, DAC Ph.D. student in computer science, teaching at her alma mater, Grand Valley State University.

Students at the Discovery Analytics Center have headed off to summer jobs and internships from coast to coast. Following is a good example of the kind of real world experience they are getting.

Payel Bandyopadhyay, a Ph.D. student in computer science, is working on data visualization at UPS Advanced Technology Group, Atlanta, Georgia, where she is helping redesign the UPS parcel tracker website. Her advisor is Chris North.

Jinwoo Choi, a Ph.D. student in electrical and computer engineering, is a computer vision researcher at NEC Labs America, Cupertino, California, working in the area of video understanding/action recognition. Choi’s advisor is Jia-Bin Huang.

Michelle Dowling, a Ph.D. student in computer science, is an instructor at her alma mater, Grand Valley State University in Allendale, Michigan.  She is co-teaching an introductory computer science course with Professor Roger Ferguson. Dowling’s advisor is Chris North.

Shuangfei Fan, a Ph.D. student in computer science, is a software engineer at Instagram in New York City. Her advisor is Bert Huang.

Abhinav Kumar, a master’s student in computer science, is an intern at PayPal in San Jose, California, where he is working on credit risk centric problems. His advisor is Edward Fox.

Tianyi Li, a Ph.D. student in computer science, is a software engineer at Cloudera, in Palo Alto, California, working on visual analytics for interpreting and better training machine learning models. Her advisor is Chris North.

Yufeng Ma, a Ph.D. student in computer science, is a research scientist at Yahoo! Research, in Sunnyvale, California, where he will apply deep learning techniques to data with both images and text. Ma’s advisor is Weiguo (Patrick) Fan and his co-advisor is Edward Fox.

Elaheh Raisi, a Ph.D. student in computer science is a data scientist on the Global Risk and Data Sciences team at PayPal in San Jose, California. This team is responsible for developing and enhancing machine learning and data mining capabilities, which are key to PayPal’s top-of-the-line data-driven decisions. Raisi’s advisor is Bert Huang.

John Wenskovitch, a Ph.D. student in computer science, is visualizing sequential content in multimodal documents/reports in team collaboration settings at FXPAL in Palo Alto, California. His advisor is Chris North.

Sirui Yao, a Ph.D. student in computer science, is a research scientist at Walmart in Bentonville, Arkansas.  She is working on a project that uses machine learning to build a hiring tool, an intelligent system that assists Human Resources in selecting candidate resumes. She will also study related issues such as fairness and security. Yao’s advisor is Bert Huang.

Xuchao Zhang, a Ph.D. student in computer science, will be researching argumentative zoning and note-taking behavior during document authoring at Microsoft Research AI, in Redmond, Washington.  Zhang’s advisor is Chang-Tien Lu.

Yuliang Zou, a Ph.D. student in electrical and computer engineering, will be a researcher at Adobe Research, San Jose, California. His advisor is Jia-Bin Huang.

Sneha Mehta, a Ph.D. student in computer science, is at the Netflix headquarters in Los Gatos, California, working on the open-ended problem of using Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques to tangibly improve the quality of machine translated subtitles. Her advisor is Naren Ramakrishnan.

“Our DAC students greatly benefit from being out in the workforce during the summer months,” said Naren Ramakrishnan, the Thomas L. Phillips Professor of Engineering in the Department of Computer Science and director of the Discovery Analytics Center. “In addition to contributing their skills to problems faced by companies, what they learn from these opportunities is invaluable and an important part of their graduate education.”