Award
2018 NSF Career Award Winner
Department
Computer Science
What is the impact of your research?
My research focuses on data mining and applied machine learning with emphasis on big-data problems in large, real-world networks and time-series. Networks are a great abstraction for modeling many real-world phenomena like population networks, biological networks and the world-wide-web among others.
The recent explosion in the availability of data presents a unique opportunity to conduct large-scale studies using these models. My work uses networks to help bridge the sore gap between data and actionable strategies/policies and insights in crucial areas such as epidemiology/public health, cyber security, critical infrastructure systems, and social media.
Data-driven approaches can provide more robust, “real-time,” and flexible options to standard model-based strategies. Hence I feel there is a lot of scientific, commercial and social value in this research.
What do you like most about the field of computer science?
There are many aspects which drew me to computer science. I like the enormous tangible, visible and real-world impact the field has. As computation and data is fundamental in nature, I feel this allows me to connect to a variety of domains like physics, medicine and healthcare, engineering, sociology and even policy. I also like its theoretical, logical, mathematical and 'problem-solving' nature. Finally, growing up, I was just fascinated by computers, and programming them to do what you wanted in their own language.
What path did you take to get to this point in your career and research?
For my undergraduate degree, I studied Computer Science and Engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) - Bombay, graduating in 2007. I always wanted to do research, so I did a couple of summer undergraduate research projects at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) and University of British Columbia, Vancouver at the end of my sophomore and junior years. I also did a capstone research project at IIT-Bombay in my senior year. All these projects gave me some valuable research experience, and I enjoyed the process. So I joined the Department of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh for my Ph.D. studies. There I joined my advisors' group which was doing work in data mining. I had a great time there. Although I did a summer internship multiple times in companies such as Microsoft, Sprint and Yahoo, I felt more at home in academia. Then I graduated and joined Virginia Tech as an tenure-track assistant professor in the computer science department in 2012.
When you are not researching, what do you enjoy doing in your spare time?
I enjoy music and play Tabla (an Indian percussion instrument) sometimes. I also like reading non-fiction books, watching movies, and traveling in my spare time.