News

Andreea Sistrunk’s motto, “A best solution to everything is up to us to uncover,” evolved on her path to earning a Ph.D. in computer science at Virginia Tech’s Northern Virginia campus.

“In the beginning, I found myself overwhelmed and at times discouraged by how fast technology is advancing,” she said. “As hard as I was trying, I could not get the data I needed for my work.”

Sistrunk’s research for her dissertation is at the intersection of computer science, education policy, and geographical information systems and related to Redistrict, an online software platform built by a team of researchers at the Sanghani Center for Artificial Intelligence and Data Analytics to help school districts with their rezoning efforts. 

Read full story here.

This summer marked the Earth’s hottest on record.

The Roanoke Valley was no exception to the heat, with news reports naming 2023 as the region’s second-hottest summer. But the rising temperatures were particularly stifling for some neighborhoods in Roanoke —  those impacted by harmful urban planning practices.

Naren Ramakrishnan, the Thomas L. Phillips Professor of Engineering and director of the Sanghani Center for Artificial Intelligence and Data Analytics, and Nathan Self, research associate at the center, are on a team of researchers led by Theodore Lim, who will use a National Science Foundation grant to work with Roanoke communities to combat the impact of rising temperatures and promote healing among those impacted by harmful urban planning practices. Read full story here.

Each year, heat waves kill more Americans than any other natural disaster. Climate change has exacerbated the problem by creating measurably higher temperatures in areas of cities with fewer economic and social resources to mitigate the impacts of heat, according to Theo Lim, an assistant professor of urban affairs and planning at Virginia Tech.
 
Lim is leading a multidisciplinary Virginia Tech research team that is partnering with the City of Roanoke to help residents survive, adapt, and thrive through high temperatures and heat waves.

The six-person team received a Stage 1 Civic Innovation Challenge (CIVIC) Planning Grant, funded by the National Science Foundation. The challenge supports rapid implementation of community-driven, research-based pilot projects that address heat resilience priorities.

Naren Ramakrishnan, the Thomas L. Phillips Professor of Engineering at Virginia Tech and director of the director of the Sanghani Center for Artificial Intelligence and Data Analytics, is one of the co-investigators of the project.  Read full story here.

About the series: Every complex problem has many multidisciplinary angles. Leveraging expertise and energy, Virginia Tech faculty and students serve humanity by addressing the world’s most difficult problems.

With risk of political and targeted violence on the rise across the United States, national and local leaders are asking Princeton University’s nonpartisan Bridging Divides Initiative (BDI) to provide them with more timely, reliable, and context-specific data on targeted violence events that could help them engage locally and better inform their policy decisions. 

As part of their response to this plea, BDI’s team of Princeton social scientists collaborated with data scientists at the Sanghani Center for Artificial Intelligence and Data Analytics to identify targeted violence events. These often include hate crimes and other incidents that target individuals because of their race, religion, sexual orientation, or other perceived characteristics. Click here to read more about this research.

Nearly half the world’s forests are under threat of deforestation and forest degradation.

Forests are at most risk of being destroyed by degradation — slashed trees, bare clearings, newly formed trenches and water gullies, and water clouded by eroding soil — which often leads to deforestation. Forest degradation has an even greater environmental, economic, and social impact because it not only affects the structure and function of a forest, but also lowers its capacity to provide goods and ecosystem services to help keep air and water clean, provide wildlife and humans with shelter and food, and capture carbon. More than three-quarters of the world’s land-based species live in forests, and over 1.5 billion people rely directly on forests for their livelihoods. Click here to read more.