Shailik Sarkar, The Sanghani Center at Virginia Tech Ph.D. student Virginia Tech in the DC area, is The Washington Post intern working on a team that is trying to improve retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) solutions for News Chatbot to answer readers' ??? w/more reliable, hallucination-free, trustworthy AI responses.

Umid Suleymanov (Umid Suleymanov) stands next to a fluorescent image of Amazon's mascot Peccy in Austin, TX, where he is a data science intern working with the security testing team Amazon Web Services. Umid is a Ph.D. student in CS at the The Sanghani Center at Virginia Tech and advised by Murat Kantarcioglu.

Grad students The Sanghani Center at Virginia Tech are working at companies across the country this summer, applying their skills in AI, data analytics, and machine learning. One of them is Wei Fan, a Ph.D. student Virginia Tech Computer Science advised by Bo Ji. Wei is a software engineer intern Google in Seattle, WA.

Humbled to have our EMBERS forecasting work from KDD'04 recognized with a 2025 SIGKDD Test of Time Award—given to papers from over a decade ago that have had a lasting impact. Thanks to the awards committee and all our well-wishers in the KDD community. Tried tagging my

Computer science Ph.D. student Kazi Sajeed Mehrab (Kazi Sajeed Mehrab) is an AI/machine learning intern LinkedIn Mountain View, CA, location. He is working on research & development of LLM reasoning solutions using LinkedIn data. Kazi is advised by Anuj Karpatne The Sanghani Center at Virginia Tech.

Pin-Jie Lin (Linus Pin-Jie Lin) is applied scientist intern Amazon AGI in Seattle, WA, exploring multi-modal foundation model training & designing methods to jointly model text & speech for improved cross-modal understanding. He is a Ph.D. student The Sanghani Center at Virginia Tech advised by Tu Vu.

Virginia Tech data privacy expert Murat Kantarcioglu (Murat Kantarcioglu), CS professor & core faculty The Sanghani Center at Virginia Tech, tells Digital Journal how evolving artificial intelligence technologies could make text and other scams seem even more realistic and trick more people in the future.

Boston, MA, is home base this summer for Wei Liu (Wei Liu). She is a data science intern Verisk, where she is working on data analysis related to weather and geospatial data. A Ph.D. student in computer science, she is advised by Chris North The Sanghani Center at Virginia Tech. .

Ph.D. student Yusuf Dalva is a research intern Snap Inc., working on Snapchat project that enables users to visually target subjects to be edited & associate them w/editing concepts -- like adding a specific object to a certain location. Yusuf is advised by Pinar Yanardag The Sanghani Center at Virginia Tech

Ph.D. student Alexandra Thompson The Sanghani Center at Virginia Tech explores how to identify socioeconomic status factors w/greatest impact on CS student’s course performance & self-efficacy in computing. She presented poster of her work during main proceedings at recent 2025 ACM ICER Conference.

Gearing up for the 2025-26 academic year, which begins August 25, Naren Ramakrishnan (Naren Ramakrishnan), Chang-Tien Lu, and Sanmay Das from The Sanghani Center at Virginia Tech attended the Virginia Tech Institute for Advanced Computing's annual retreat.

AI research intern Kaliber Labs, Hasan Arif, Ph.D. student The Sanghani Center at Virginia Tech, is working on conversational pipeline for AI software for home-care assistant robots designed to support patients recovering from surgery, managing chronic conditions, or navigating aging at home challenges.

Longfeng Wu, Ph.D. student The Sanghani Center at Virginia Tech is an applied scientist intern Amazon in Sunnyvale, CA, focusing on developing large-scale generative recommendation models based on semantic IDs aimed at fundamentally transforming how recommendations are generated and delivered.

Ph.D. student Tuna Meral's (Tuna Meral) home base for summer was Amazon Science AGI Foundations, San Francisco. As applied scientist intern on video generation team, he helped develop autoregressive models for creating both images & video. His advisor The Sanghani Center at Virginia Tech: Pinar Yanardag

Core faculty The Sanghani Center at Virginia Tech Manish Bansal is leading one of 13 funded projects involving partnerships with peers at universities across the commonwealth to investigate areas of strategic interest for Virginia. He is collaborating w/Madhav Marathe UVA. tinyurl.com/yc353mrh

Wilson Chang, M.S. student The Sanghani Center at Virginia Tech advised by Chang-Tien Lu, wrapped up internship at TSMC. He worked on LLMs on high-performance GPUs and agentic AI systems for data parsing, anomaly detection & retrieval-augmented knowledge solutions in semiconductor manufacturing.