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Stacey Clifton (left), Michelle Dowling (center), and Moeti Masiane (right)

Three funded UrbComp fellows, Stacey Clifton, Michelle Dowling, and Moeti Masiane, earned the graduate certificate in urban computing this spring. The certificate is offered through the National Science Foundation-sponsored multidisciplinary UrbComp Program administered by the Discovery Analytics Center.

Clifton, advised by James Hawdon and B. Aditya Prakash, graduated with a Ph.D. in sociology and Dowling, advised by Chris North and Mike Horning, with a Ph.D. in computer science.

Masiane, advised by Chris North and Eric Jacques, will complete his Ph.D. in computer science during the summer semester.

Dowling and Masiane were also students at the Discovery Analytics Center.

Clifton was drawn to the program both for its multidisciplinary approach and as a way to advance her quantitative skillset.

“I wanted to challenge myself to do something out of the norm and UrbComp provided me with the quantitative skills to be the first in my department to complete a comprehensive examination in advanced quantitative methods,” she said.

“I was able to further apply this skillset to my dissertation research to add a novel component to the study of policing research,” said Clifton. Her dissertation is titled “Coping isn’t for the Faint of Heart: An Investigation into the Development of Coping Strategies for Incoming Police Recruits.”

Clifton, who is joining Radford University as an assistant professor in the Department of Criminal Justice, said she would “100 percent recommend this program as a vital component to graduate studies.”

For Dowling, the program “helped hone the audience for my research to those performing truthfulness determinations based on a given claim,” she said. “This allowed me to focus on how I described my research, making it easier for others to understand its impacts.”

Dowling’s dissertation is titled “Semantic Interaction for Symmetrical Analysis and Automated Foraging of Documents and Terms.”

She said that her first-hand experience of collaborating with others outside her field of study has shown her how beneficial wide collaboration can be.

“I fully intend to continue seeking such collaboration opportunities,” said Dowling, “and I hope to make connections with professors in different departments as I establish myself as an assistant professor at Grand Valley State University.

For Moeti, whose dissertation is on “Insight Driven Sampling for Interactive Data Intensive Computing,” the program expanded his interest in analyzing large data sets and telling stories about such data to include analyzing large data sets related to urban cities.

“UrbComp class projects allowed me to acquire practical experience with data analysis and machine learning and the data modeling skills I have acquired will surely help me in future data analysis work,” said Moeti. “But I think the most important thing I learned in the program was the ethical aspect of data analytics.”

The UrbComp program is open to Virginia Tech master’s and Ph.D. students in any discipline located in Blacksburg or the greater Washington D.C. campus.

For more information contact program coordinator Wanawsha Shalaby.

Among Virginia Tech graduates celebrating their achievements today include four Ph.D. and five master’s students at the Discovery Analytics Center.

Four Ph.D. students and one master’s student plan to complete degrees during the summer.

“The thoughtful and impactful research our students have engaged in while pursuing their graduate degrees has been recognized by many major academic conferences and is testament to their hard work,” said Naren Ramakrishnan, the Thomas L. Phillips Professor of Engineering and director of the center.

“We are always very proud of our graduates but especially so this year as they have had to persevere through some very unusual circumstances to achieve their goals,” Ramakrishnan said. “We wish them continued success as they venture into new career challenges at universities, research laboratories, and businesses.”

Ph.D. Spring graduates

Bijaya Adhikari, advised by B. Aditya Prakash, is receiving a Ph.D. in computer science. His research interests are data science and machine learning for large networks and data driven epidemiology. The title of his dissertation is “Domain-based Frameworks and Embeddings for Dynamics over Networks.” Adhikari is joining the Department of Computer Science at the University of Iowa in the fall as a tenure track assistant professor.

Tyler Chang, advised by Layne Watson, is receiving a Ph.D. in computer science. His research interests are numerical approximation, optimization, algorithms, parallel computing, data science, and scientific computing. The title of his dissertation is “Mathematical Software for Multi-objective Optimization Problems.” Chang is joining the Mathematics and Computer Science Division at Argonne National Laboratory in Chicago, Illinois. Specifically, he will work in the Laboratory for Applied Mathematics, Numerical Software, and Statistics as a postdoctoral appointee, a group he previously interned with.

Michelle Dowling, advised by Chris North and Mike Horning, is receiving a Ph.D. in computer science. She is also receiving a graduate certificate in urban computing, a National Science Foundation-sponsored program administered through DAC. Dowling’s research interests are human-computer interaction, data analytics, information visualization, and interactive data visualization. The title of her dissertation is “Semantic Interaction for Symmetrical Analysis and Automated Foraging of Documents and Terms.” Dowling is joining Grand Valley State University, her alma mater, as an assistant professor.

Mohammad Raihanul Islam, advised by Naren Ramakrishnan, is receiving a Ph.D. in computer science. His research interests are social network/media analysis, deep learning, and graph neural network. The title of his dissertation is “Detecting and Mitigating Rumors in Social Media.”  Islam is joining Amazon, Inc., as an applied scientist. 

Liuqing Li, advised by Edward Fox, is receiving a Ph.D. in computer science. His research interests are digital library, social analysis, machine learning, and deep learning. The title of his dissertation is “Event-related Collections Understanding and Services.” Li is joining Yahoo! as a research scientist.

Master’s Spring Graduates

Arjun Choudhry, advised by Naren Ramakrishnan, is receiving a master’s degree in computer science.  His research interests are narrative generation, blockchain technologies. His thesis is titled “The Art of Simplifying Graph Interpretation: Narrative Generation Using Causal Exploration of Directed Graphs.” Choudhry is joining Amazon, Seattle, as a software development engineer.

Jeffrey McCullen, advised by Chandan Reddy, received a master’s degree in computer science. His research interests are machine learning and data analytics in healthcare, and software engineering.  The title of his thesis is “Predicting the Effects of Sedative Infusion on Acute Traumatic Brain Injury Patients.”

Joseph Messou, advised by Jia-Bin Huang, is receiving a master’s degree in computer engineering. His research interests are computer vision and machine learning, efficient training methods for networks, and cybersecurity. The title of his thesis is “Handling Invalid Pixels in Convolutional Neural Networks.”  In the fall, Messou will be a Ph.D. student in computer engineering at the University of Maryland, College Park.

Shih-Yang Su, advised by Jia-Bin Huang, is receiving a master’s degree in computer engineering. His research interests are machine perception, visual representation learning, and reinforcement learning. His thesis is titled “Learning to Handle Occlusion for Motion Analysis and View Synthesis.” In the fall, Su will be a Ph.D. student in computer science at the University of British Columbia, where his research will focus on learning and understanding human motion for motion synthesis and character animations.

Ming Wang, advised by Chris North, is receiving a master’s degree in computer science. Her research interests are visual analytics and information visualization. Her thesis is titled “Bridging Cognitive Gaps Between User and Model in Interactive Dimension Reduction.” Wang is joining Salesforce as a software engineer.

Summer Ph.D. graduates

Zhiqian (Danny) Chen, advised by Chang-Tien Lu, will complete his Ph.D. in computer science. Chen’s research interests are graph mining, urban computing, network science. The title of his dissertation is “Graph Neural Networks: Techniques and Applications.” Chen will join the Computer Science and Engineering Department at Mississippi State University as assistant professor.

Tianyi Li, advised by Chris North, will complete her Ph.D. in computer science. Her research interests include developing systems for computer-supported cooperative work and devising visual analytics tools with user-centered design to combine and coordinate human and artificial intelligence in broader, real-world sensemaking processes. Her dissertation is titled “Solving Mysteries with Crowds: Supporting Crowdsourced Sensemaking with a Modularized Pipeline and Context Slices.”  Li will be joining Loyola University in Chicago as assistant professor.

Thomas Lux, advised by Layne Watson, will complete his Ph.D. in computer science. His research interests are approximation, optimization, and mathematical software. His dissertation is titled “Interpolants and Error Bounds for Modeling and Predicting Variability in Computer Systems.”

Moeti Masiane, advised by Chris North, will complete his Ph.D. in computer science. He has received a graduate certificate in urban computing, a National Science Foundation-sponsored program administered through DAC. Masiane’s research interests include information visualization, data modeling, insight, sampling, and perception modeling. The title of his dissertation is “Insight Driven Sampling for Interactive Data Intensive Computing.”

Summer master’s graduate

Milad Afzalan, advised by Hoda Eldardiry, will complete his master’s degree in computer science. His research interests include machine learning, pattern recognition, smart grid, and energy efficiency. The title of his thesis is “Household electricity load shape segmentation from smart meter data based on temporal patterns and power magnitude.” Afzalan, who will also be receiving a Ph.D. from Virginia Tech in civil engineering, will join ENGIE as a data scientist.

Chris North, associate director of the Discovery Analytics Center, and Ph.D. students Michelle Dowling and John Wenskovitch will be in Berlin, Germany, from Oct. 21 to 26, attending the 2018 IEEE VIS Conference.

In addition to presenting their research, the three are organizers of a conference workshop: Machine Learning from User Interaction for Visualization and Analytics.

IEEE VIS is the worldwide largest and most important conference on Scientific Visualization, Information Visualization and Visual Analytics. It is the premier forum for advances in visualization in academia, science, government, industry, and beyond.

Dowling, who is also a National Science Foundation research trainee in the Urban Computing Certificate program, will present SIRIUS: Dual, Symmetric, Interactive Dimension Reductions, which she coauthored with Wenskovitch, DAC Ph.D. student J.T. Fry, and DAC faculty Leanna House, Scotland Leman, and North.

Wenskovitch will present the second accepted DAC paper, The Effect of Semantic Interaction on Foraging in Text Analysis, which he coauthored with DAC Ph.D. student Lauren Bradel, Dowling, House, and North.

The workshop taking place on Oct. 22 has been designed to bring together researchers from across all VIS fields to share their expertise and generate an open discussion about what is currently learned from user interaction and where future research in this area can go.

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.”

Michelle Dowling, DAC Ph.D. student in computer science

The desire to combine psychology with her knowledge and expertise in computer science in an interesting and challenging way drew Michelle Dowling toward her current research in human-computer interaction (HCI). This area of study allows her to focus on the cognitive (human) side of research rather than just on programming and computer science.

While exploring graduate program opportunities at Virginia Tech, Dowling, who earned a bachelor’s degree in computer science from Grand Valley State University, met DAC Associate Director Chris North. North introduced her to his research in information visualization and interactive data analytics tools. “I felt it was a perfect fit and decided to join Dr. North in his InfoVis Lab,” Dowling said.

Her research is focused on how to visualize and interact with high-dimensional data — more than three attributes/dimensions/properties of the individual data items, for example — contained in text-based documents, images, spreadsheets, or other various data sources. The sources are plotted onto a map using multi-dimensional scaling (MDS) algorithms. The parameters can then be upweighted or down weighted by the user to produce a different visualization.

“By its very nature, this research is extremely interdisciplinary, pulling from the psychology background in HCI; current research from collaborators in the Statistics department; and domain experts or end users who will use the data analytics tools we create,” Dowling said.

She is also a National Science Foundation research trainee in the UrbComp program administered through DAC.

Dowling will receive an M.S. in computer science in May. Her Ph.D. is on target for spring 2020. After graduation, she is looking toward an academic career. This summer, Dowling is co-teaching an introductory course to computer science at her alma mater in Allendale, Michigan.