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

Satish Tadepalli (Ph.D., CS)
Ying Jin (Ph.D., CS)
Michael Narayan (Ph.D., CS)
Yong Ju Cho (Ph.D., CS)
Sheng Guo (Ph.D., CS)
Debprakash Patnaik(Ph.D., CS)
Don Conry (M.S., CS)
Patrick Butler (M.S., CS)
Clifford Conley Owens (M.S., CS)

WHAT'S HAPPENING

July 18: PLoS Computational Biology paper on biochemical switches is published online.
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.
```
 ----------------------------------------- 
```
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).
```
 ----------------------------------------- 
```
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.