Her research at the Sanghani Center has focused on how students use the interactive dimensionality reduction application Andromeda. “I want to understand how students — when given complex data analysis tools — learn from the experience of conducting exploratory data analysis,” said Taylor, who is advised by Chris North.
For this study, the classroom teacher uploaded data describing projects to Andromeda with each point in the visualization representing a student’s design. With Andromeda controlled by the teacher, students used it to visualize, analyze, and compare their designs in extended conversation with each other and the teacher and collectively explore their design-related data.
““Despite not having the mathematical background to understand dimensionality reduction, the students in our study learned about relations between variables and felt that Andromeda helped them compare their designs in a friendly, but competitive manner,” Taylor said.
In the study, she said, the team also suggested ways of improving Andromeda’s utility as a public, educational resource and provided an example of class activity aligned with Virginia’s proposed Standards of Learning in data science.
Taylor was introduced to research in visualization while doing an undergraduate capstone project in human-computer interaction.
“The Sanghani Center conducts interesting research within data science and machine learning,” said Taylor, “and as a master’s degree student, it has afforded me useful connections across the field which will continue to be valuable as I will be remaining in the Blacksburg area as a machine learning engineer after graduation.”
Yue Feng, a Ph.D. student in electrical and computer engineering, is an intern with the Snap Research Creative Vision Team in Santa Monica, California.
With restrictions to working in physical office space still in effect, graduate students at the Sanghani Center are working remotely this summer for companies, labs, and programs from coast to coast. Students are not only gaining real-world experience from internships and other opportunities but, in many cases, they are also able to advance their own research interests.
Following is a list of Sanghani Center students and the work they are doing:
Badour AlBahar, a Ph.D. student in electrical and computer
engineering, is a computer
vision intern at Adobe Vision group in San Jose, California. She is
working on human reposing and animation. Her advisor is Jia-Bin Huang.
Sikiru Adewale, a Ph.D. student in computer science, is a software development engineer intern at Amazon Web Service in Seattle, Washington. He is working on data transfer and storage on the AWS snowball device. His advisor is Ismini Lourentzou.
Vasanth Reddy Baddam, a Ph.D. student in computer science, is an research intern at Siemens in Princeton, New Jersey. He is working on contributing to industrial research projects on leveraging machine learning to analyze multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) algorithms and implement them. His advisor is Hoda Eldardiry.
Subhodip Biswas, a Ph.D. student in computer science, is working on Bayesian optimization techniques for automated machine learning (AutoML) and robust artificial intelligence systems as part of the Journeyman Fellowship he received from the DEVCOM Army Research Laboratory (ARL) Research Associateship Program (RAP) administered by the Oak Ridge Associated Universities (ORAU). His advisor is Naren Ramakrishnan.
Jie Bu, a Ph.D. student in computer science, is a research intern at Carbon 3D in Redwood City, California. He is working on artificial intelligence-powered computational geometry. His advisor is Anuj Karpatne.
Si Chen, a Ph.D. student in computer engineering, is a research intern at InnoPeak Technology in Seattle, Washington. She is working on research on model privacy protection. Her advisor is Ruoxi Jia.
Kai-Hsiang Cheng, a master’s degree student in computer science, is an intern at GTV Media Group in New York City. He is working on the content management system of the media’s platform. His advisor is Chang-Tien Lu.
Riya Dani, a master’s degree student in computer science, is a software engineer intern at Microsoft. She is working on web application developments under Azure. Her advisor is Ismini Lourentzou.
Debanjan Datta, a Ph.D. student in computer science, is an intern on the Amazon
Web Services team at Amazon in Seattle, Washington. He is working on time
series characterization and classification.
His advisor is Naren Ramakrishnan.
Arka Daw, a
Ph.D. student in computer science, is an applied scientist
intern at Amazon Web Services Lambda Science
Team in Seattle, Washington. He is
working on developing an
automated causal machine learning framework for setting up experiments and
estimating causal effects from observational data. His advisor is Anuj Karpatne.
Yue Feng, a Ph.D. student in electrical and computer engineering, is an intern with the Snap Research Creative Vision Team in Santa Monica, California. She is working on a 3D computer vision project. Her advisor is Jia-Bin Huang.
Chen Gao, a Ph.D. student in electrical and computer engineering, is a
research intern at Google in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He is working on
creating video panoramas using a cellphone. His advisor is Jia-Bin Huang.
Jianfeng He, a Ph.D. student in computer science, is an intern at Tencent AI Lab in Seattle,Washington. He is working on
research about multi-modal dialogue with mentors Linfeng Song and Kun Xu. His
advisor is Chang Tien-Lu.
Taoran Ji, a Ph.D. student in
computer science, is an intern at Moody’s Analytics in New York City. He is
working on analyzing credit and financial data for the global financial
markets, which will drive algorithmic improvements in Moody’s Analytics core
machine learning and artificial intelligence-driven products. His advisor is
Chang-Tien Lu.
Adheesh Juvekar, a Ph.D. student in computer science, is a machine learning and natural language processing intern at Deloitte & Touche LLP. He is working on automatically extracting relevant information from transactional invoices using state of the art deep learning techniques. His advisor is Edward Fox.
M. Maruf, a Ph.D. student in computer science, is a machine learning engineering intern at Qualcomm GNSS/location team in Santa Clara, California. He is applying machine learning techniques to hybrid technology fusion for navigation/positioning in mobile, wearable, automotive, and micro-mobility applications. His advisor is Anuj Karpatne.
Nikhil Muralidhar, a Ph.D. student in computer science,
received an Applied Machine Learning
Summer Research Fellowship at
Los Alamos National Lab in Los Alamos, New Mexico, to work with researchers on
physics-informed machine learning for modeling adsorption equilibria in
fluid mixtures. His advisor is Naren Ramakrishnan.
Makanjuola Ogunleye, a Ph.D. student in computer science, is an application support engineer intern at Northwestern Mutual in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. His duties include coding, testing, and implementing complex programs from user specifications. He is also performing client data analysis to support engineering technology to improve and facilitate customer success. His advisor is Ismini Lourentzou.
Nishan Pokharel, a master’s degree student in computer science, is a software engineering intern at Capital One in Mclean, Virginia. He is working on network infrastructure automation. His advisor is Chris North
Avi Seth, a master’s degree student in computer science, is serving as a graduate team leader this summer for Virginia Tech’s Data Science for the Public Good program. The group works on projects that address state, federal, and local government challenges around today’s relevant and critical social issues. His advisor is Ismini Lourentzou.
Mia Taylor, a master’s degree student in computer science, is a software
development intern at Amazon Web
Services in Seattle, Washington. Her team is working with Comprehend
AutoML which allows customers to build customized natural language processing
models using their own data. Her advisor
is Lifu Huang.
Yiran Xu, a Ph.D. student in electrical and computer engineering, is an intern with the Snap Research Creative Vision Team in Santa Monica, California. He is working on 3D human reconstruction and video generation/manipulation. His advisor is Jia-Bin Huang.
Shuaicheng Zhang, a Ph.D. student in computer science, is a natural language processing (NLP) research intern at Deloitte in New York City. He is part of the Audit and Assurance AI innovation team, working on open information extraction on internal control files to help auditors effortlessly process these files. His advisor is Lifu Huang.
Yuliang
Zou, a Ph.D. student in electrical and computer engineering, is a
research intern at Waymo in Mountainview, California. He is working on the perception
problem for self-driving cars. His
advisor is Jia-Bin Huang.
DAC Ph.D. student Chidubem Arachie is working remotely as an intern at Google Research.
A national pandemic that forced the closing of physical offices has not stopped graduate students at the Discovery Analytics Center from working remote internships at companies, research laboratories, and other institutions across the country. For many students, summer internships help further their own research as they gain real world experience.
Following is a list of DAC students and the work they are doing for the next few months:
Chidubem Arachie, a Ph.D. student in computer science, is a research intern at Google Research in Mountain View California. He is working on generative modeling for 3D shapes. His advisor is Bert Huang.
John Aromando, a Ph.D. student in computer science, is an intern at Graf Research in Blacksburg, working on utilizing natural language processing to support the software verification process. His advisor is Edward Fox.
Hongjie Chen, a Ph.D. student in computer science, is a data science research intern at Adobe in San Jose, California. He is on the Cloud Technology Team, researching cloud resource allocation strategy. His advisor is Hoda Eldardiry.
Nurendra Choudhary, a Ph.D. student in computer science, is an applied science intern with the Amazon Search Team in Palo Alto, California. He is working on representation learning of products by leveraging the heterogeneous relations between them. His advisor is Chandan Reddy.
Chen Gao, a Ph.D. student in electrical and computer engineering, is a research intern at Google in Mountain View, California. He is working on improvements to the portrait mode on the Google Pixel phone. His advisor is Jia-Bin Huang.
Akshita Jha, a Ph.D. student in computer science, is a research intern in the Interdigital AI Lab in Palo Alto, California. Her work involves building interpretable natural language processing models. Her advisor is Chandan Reddy.
Prerna Juneja, a Ph.D. student in computer science, is an intern at the Information Science Institute at the University of Southern California with Emilio Ferrara, assistant research professor and associate director of Applied Data Science in the Department of Computer Science. She is investigating the spread of COVID-19 related conspiracy theories on Twitter. Her advisor is Tanushree Mitra.
You Lu, a Ph.D. student in computer science, is a research intern at NEC Labs America in Princeton, New Jersey, working on sequence labeling for signals in fibers. His advisor is Bert Huang.
Shruti Phadke, a Ph.D. student in computer science, is doing a research internship with James Pennebaker, a professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Texas at Austin. She is studying online communities, their social processes, and behaviors. Her advisor is Tanushree Mitra.
Aarathi Raghuraman, a master’s degree student in computer science, is an intern at GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), working with the Digital, Data, and Analytics team to maximize process yield in upstream biopharm manufacturing. She is advised by Lenwood Heath.
Esther Robb, a master’s degree student in electrical and computer engineering, is a research intern at Google working with a team in San Francisco on reinforcement learning. Her advisor is Jia-Bin Huang.
Mandar Sharma, a master’s student in computer science, is working as a machine learning intern with Toyota Motors North America, specifically the Toyota Racing Development (TRD) branch, to help NASCAR drivers make better decisions when they are racing. His advisor is Naren Ramakrishnan.
Aarohi Sumant, a master’s student in computer science, is an intern at Amazon. She is working with the Kindle Marketing Team to develop machine learning techniques for book recommendations based on cross user activities as well as single-user activities on different Amazon platforms. Her advisor is Edward Fox.
Afrina Tabassum, a Ph.D. student in computer science is a data science intern in the Data Science for The Public Good (DSPG) program at the Biocomplexity Institute’s Social and Decision Analytics Division (SDAD) at the University of Virginia. She is working on projects that address state, federal, and local government challenges around critical social issues relevant in the world today. Her advisor is Hoda Eldardiry.
Mia Taylor, a senior undergrad in computer science, is interning at Amazon Web Services in the Route 53 (DNS) service. Her advisor is Hoda Eldardiry.
Sirui Yao, a Ph.D. student in computer science, is an intern at Google, working on tag prediction for recommender systems through learning items and tags embeddings. Her advisor is Bert Huang.
Shengzhe Xu, a Ph.D. student in computer science, is interning at Facebook Ads Core ML, working on attention-based time sequential embedding aggregation. Xu’s advisor is Naren Ramakrishnan.
Ming Zhu, a Ph.D. student in computer science, is interning at Amazon. She is an applied scientist intern for Amazon Alexa AI, working on conversational query representation learning. Zhu’s advisor is Chandan Reddy.
Yuliang Zou, a Ph.D. student in electrical and computer engineering, is working on learning with less/weaker annotations at Google. His advisor is Jia-Bin Huang.
