News

Members of the staff of the Discovery Analytics Center. Left to right are Nathan Self, Patrick Butler, and Naren Ramakrishnan.

DAC and director, Naren Ramakrishnan, are featured as this month’s Virginia Tech​ Inventors of the Month by the Office of Research and Innovation for work in Early Model Based Event Recognition using Surrogates (EMBERS) software project.

EMBERS is a fully automated system for forecasting significant societal events, such as influenza-like illness case counts, rare disease outbreaks, civil unrest, domestic political crises, and elections, from open source surrogates. To read more about EMBERS click here.

Parang Saraf, a DAC/CS Ph.D. student in the National Capital Region, recently accepted the VAST Challenge 2014 Grand Challenge Award for Effective Analysis and Presentation in Paris, France. The VAST Challenge provides an opportunity for visual analytics researchers to test their innovative thoughts on approaching problems in a wide range of subject domains against realistic datasets and problem scenarios. The award was presented during the IEEE Vis Conference, where Saraf spoke for 30 minutes about the team’s solution to the challenge.

The VAST Challenge provides an opportunity for visual analytics researchers to test their innovative thoughts on approaching problems in a wide range of subject domains against realistic datasets and problem scenarios.

The award was presented during the IEEE Vis Conference, where Saraf spoke for 30 minutes about the team’s solution to the challenge.

Saraf led the winning Virginia Tech team which also included Patrick Butler, a recent Ph.D. graduate from the Department of Computer Science in Blacksburg who is currently working with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

VAST Challenge 2014 was comprised of three Mini-Challenges and one Grand Challenge. The data sets included unstructured news articles, email headers, GPS data, financial transaction data and real-time streaming data. Only the teams who finished all three mini challenges were allowed to submit to the grand challenge.

In total there were 77 submissions for all the challenges and only seven teams progressed to the Grand Challenge. The Virginia Tech team submitted to all three Mini-Challenges and in addition to the Grand Challenge Award, won an honorable mention for Effective Presentation in Mini-Challenge 2.

Saraf’s research area is data mining with specific interests in social media analytics and data visualization. He works on theOpen Source Indicators (OSI) EMBERS project supervised by Discovery Analytics Center Director Naren Ramakrishnan at the Virginia Tech Research Center — Arlington.