Naren Ramakrishnan: Research Group

[I have resisted the temptation to come up with some silly acronym or all-encompassing name for my group. This is partly because I like to think we do good work of all kinds, and partly because I am not sure what we will be working on a few years from now. :-)]

GROUP MEMBERS

Ying Jin (Ph.D., CS)
Michael Narayan (Ph.D., CS)
Yong Ju Cho (Ph.D., CS)
Debprakash Patnaik(Ph.D., CS)
Sheng Guo (Ph.D., CS)
Vandana Sreedharan (Ph.D., GBCB)
Patrick Butler (M.S., CS)
Clifford Conley Owens (M.S., CS)
Evan Maxwell (M.S., CS)

WHAT'S HAPPENING

2009

Nov 5: Congrats to Conley for successfully defending his MS thesis!
Oct 18: Naren is named an ACM distinguished scientist.
Sep 15: Three new grants from NSF: (i) collaborative grant with Chris Bailey-Kellogg (of Dartmouth), Chris Leangmead (of CMU), and Alan Friedman (of Purdue) for "Integration, Prediction, and Generation of Mixed Mode Information using Graphical Models"; (ii) with Chris North and Francis Quek on "Formal Models, Algorithms, and Visualizations for Storytelling Analytics"; (iii) with Ed Fox, Andrea Kavanaugh, and Don Shoemaker on "CTRnet: A Global Human and Computer Network for Crisis, Tragedy, and Recovery".
Sep 10-12: Naren is a co-organizer for this year's NAE Frontiers of Engineering Symposium in Irvine, CA.
Sep 4: Congrats to Deb for his paper on spike train analysis accepted to ICDM'09!
July 31: Congrats to Don for his paper accepted to ACM Recsys'09 and to Sheng for his paper accepted to ACM CIKM'09!
Jun 15: Many thanks to HP Labs for supporting our group's work with a HP Labs innovation research award! This work will develop temporal data mining algorithms for sustainability characterization of IT ecosystems.
Jun 4: Congrats to Don for successfully defending his MS thesis!
May 27: Congrats to Deb for receiving the "Best Application Paper Runner-up" Award at KDD'09!
May 25: Lab moves to our new digs in Torg 2050.
May 11: Congrats to Pilsung for completing his Ph.D. prelim exam!
Apr 9: Congrats to Deb on his KDD'09 paper acceptance! It describes joint work with HP Labs on using data mining for sustainability characterization of data center chillers.
Jan 29: Congrats to Dr. Satish Tadepalli for a successful Ph.D. defense of his work on Schemas of Clustering! He is joining the CAMERA project at UCSD as a post-doc.

2009

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2008

Dec 2: Congrats to Ying for successfully completing her Ph.D. preliminary examination!
Nov 20: Conley has the following to say about the third homework for CS 5634:
Its good to know the side effects of our assignments! :-)
Oct 13: Congrats to Pilsung for his paper on adaptive composition and Conley for his paper on mining truth tables, both of which have been accepted to ACM SAC'09!
Oct 7: NSF profiles chemical switches work with Prof. Upi Bhalla of NCBS in their "Discoveries" section. Thanks to Dana Cruikshank for the interview and Zina Deretsky for the very nice graphic illustration. Also picked up by ACM Technews (Oct 6, 2008).
Aug 22: Congrats to Nick Andrews whose paper on relation discovery has been accepted to EMNLP'08!
Aug 20: Naren is appointed as associate department head for graduate studies.
Aug 18: Great news! The department's graduate program is ranked as a "top 10 IT school to watch" by Computerworld. The CW story includes interviews with and quotes by Deept Kumar, group alumnus, and Naren.
July 18: PLoS Computational Biology paper on biochemical switches is published online with an accompanying press release from Virginia Tech.
July 17: Naren is invited to be serve on the organizing committee of the 2009 US Frontiers of Engineering (US FOE) Symposium and to also attend the 2008 Symposium to be held in Albuquerque, NM, Sep 2008.
June 27: Naren is promoted to full professor. Grateful acknowledgements are due to my inquisitive students, brilliant collaborators, thoughtful mentors, and generous funding support over the years.
May 25: Congrats to Yong Ju whose paper on network reconstruction has been accepted to KDD'08!
May 20: Welcome to Snigdha Chaturvedi who is visiting us as an intern from IIT Kanpur.
May 14: Naren is invited to join the editorial board of Journal of Intelligent Information Systems.
May 12: Naren joins the editorial advisory panel for IEEE Computer, in addition to being an area editor.
May 10: Its graduation time! Congrats to Nick Andrews (double B.S. in Math and CS; joining BBN), James Knighton (B.S. in CS; joining Google), and Evan Maxwell (B.S. in CS; continuing at VT for graduate studies)!
May 7: Congrats to Ying whose paper on phenotype modeling has been accepted to CSB 2008!
March 20: Naren is invited to attend the Google Faculty Summit to be held in July 2008.
Jan 9: New year, new beginnings. Debprakash Patnaik joins our group as a Ph.D. student from IISc, Bangalore.

2008

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2007

Nov 28: General Motors funds data mining research in neuroinformatics. The VT press release is also reported by ACM TechNews (Nov 30, 2007).
Nov 15: Naren is invited to join the editorial board of Knowledge and Information Systems.
Nov 8-9: Long-time friends and collaborators Chris Bailey-Kellogg and John Thomas are visiting us from Dartmouth College. John is also giving a talk on his research.
Oct 27-Nov 1: ICDM'07 in Omaha a grand success! Here's a little news blurb about it. ICDM next year will be held in Pisa, Italy, with Naren as a general chair along with Carlo Zaniolo and Franco Turini.
Oct 8: Congrats to Ying whose paper on compositional data mining has been accepted to the ACM Transactions on Knowledge Discovery from Data.
Sep 26: Congrats to Satish for successfully defending his Ph.D. proposal!
Sep 18: Congrats to Satish whose paper on segmentation has been accepted to APBC 2008!
Aug 31: Storytelling featured in Virginia Tech Research Magazine (Summer 2007) with Deept, Joe, and Rich Helm's lab. Writeup available here.
July 30: ICDM'07 conference results announced. Out of 530 submissions, 40 have been accepted as regular papers (7.5% acceptance rate) and 61 as short papers (19.05% overall acceptance rate).
July 9: Computerworld lists Naren among those who are entering middle age.
May 18: Vishal Surana and Rohit Jain join us as interns for this summer, from IIT Madras and IIT Kanpur, respectively.
May 15: New grants: from INL (Idaho National Lab), for research into storytelling over the national nuclear archive and from NSF, to build a digital library of information related to 4/16 at VT. Both projects are jointly with Prof. Fox.
May 8: Congratulations to Joe Gresock for a successful M.S. defense of his thesis on storytelling! Joe will be joining the data mining division of Lockheed Martin in Summer 2007.
May 2: Conley wins a "faculty choice" award for his poster on "Mining Truth Tables" in the VTURCS Spring Symposium. Congrats to Conley!
Apr 19: Congratulations to Dr. Deept Kumar for a successful Ph.D. defense of his work titled: "Redescription Mining: Algorithms and Applications in Bioinformatics"! Deept is leaving the cozy life of academia to explore startup space.
Apr 16: Senseless shooting kills 32 people on campus. Thanks to many of our friends and alumni for their sympathies and condolences.
Apr 3: "Graphical Models of Residue Coupling in Protein Families" paper accepted to IEEE/ACM Transactions on Computational Biology and Bioinformatics (joint work with C. Bailey-Kellogg and J. Thomas of Dartmouth College).
Mar 23: "Scouts, Promoters, and Connectors" paper accepted to special issue of ACM Transactions on the Web (selected papers from ACM Electronic Commerce'06; joint work with B.K. Mohan of Google and B.J. Keller of Eastern Michigan University).
Feb 25: The storytelling project is covered in a "Future of Search" newspiece by Erika Morphy.
Feb 8: Naren and Murali, with Wu Feng, are visiting Eli Lilly Labs (Indianapolis) tomorrow and giving an invited talk on compositional data mining.
Feb 1: Clifford (Conley) Owens and Don Conry join our group, with interests in data mining and recommender systems, respectively. Conley is a senior in computer science; Don is pursuing his Masters in CS and joins us with a B.S. in CS from Rutgers and several years of industrial experience.
Jan 22: Colorful newsbyte about our storytelling work appears in the NIH funded Biomedical Computation Review (Winter 06/07 issue).

2007

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2006

Dec 25: Ying Jin joins our group as a Ph.D. student transfering from the Northern Virginia campus.
Dec 18-22: Naren is a vice chair for ICDM'06 and will be program co-chair for next year's ICDM (ICDM'07).
Sep 25: Our storytelling work, presented at KDD'06, is prominently reported in multiple news outlets beginning with the VT press release "New Search Engine Can be used for Creative Discovery". This "story" (sic!) has since been picked up by UPI, Newswise, Political Gateway, WebProNews, Web Design News, DailyIndia.com, CCN Magazine, HPCwire, and PhysOrg.com.
Aug 20: Deept, Satish, and Naren attend KDD'06 in Philly along with T.M. Murali. Our group presented three papers, two in the main conference (which had an overall acceptance rate of less than 23% this year). With colleagues from General Motors Research and IISc Bangalore, Naren also co-chaired the KDD workshop on network reconstruction from dynamic data.
June 30: Naren is principal investigator of a new ($640K) NSF Computer Systems Research (CSR) grant titled "The Adaptive Code Kitchen: Flexible Tools for Dynamic Application Composition." This project is in collaboration with Srinidhi Varadarajan, Cal Ribbens, and Danesh Tafti (of Mechanical Engineering). As the name connotes, the adaptive code kitchen will be a loose collection of capabilities by which an application scientist can specify and realize "recipes" of adaptivity around native object codes.