Naren Ramakrishnan honored as Association for Computing Machinery fellow
Ramakrishnan was recognized for his leadership in developing new algorithms and systems to forecast disease outbreaks and geopolitical events.
Naren Ramakrishnan standing in front of Virginia Tech sign in Academic Building One at Innovation Campus.
The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) has recognized Naren Ramakrishnan, the Thomas L. Phillips Professor of Engineering and director of the Sanghani Center for Artificial Intelligence and Data Analytics, as a fellow for his contributions to algorithms and systems for event modeling and forecasting.
The fellow designation is the association’s most prestigious member grade, recognizing the top 1 percent of members for their outstanding accomplishments in computing and information technology and/or outstanding service to ACM and the larger computing community.
"Computing technology has had a tremendous impact in shaping how we live and work today,” said association President Yannis Ioannidis. “The ACM fellows program honors the creativity and hard work of ACM members whose specific accomplishments drive innovation and make broader advances possible. In announcing a new class of fellows each year, we celebrate the impact some of our community’s pioneers make and highlight the many technical areas of computing in which they work.”
In keeping with the association’s global reach, the 55 fellows chosen for 2024 represent universities, corporations, and research centers in Australia, Canada, Chile, China, Denmark, Germany, India, Israel, Italy, the Netherlands, Singapore, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The association will formally recognize its newest fellows at its annual awards banquet on June 14 in San Francisco.
At the forefront of Ramakrishnan’s contributions is his leadership of the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity-supported EMBERS Open Source Indicators project, which introduced new forecasting methodologies for disease outbreaks and geopolitical events. EMBERS served as a catalyst for an extensive body of subsequent research, driving innovations that have broadened its initial scope and impact.
In the area of epidemics, Ramakrishnan and his collaborators demonstrated the importance of integrating unconventional data sources – such as social media, temporal topic trends, symptom surveys, the number of cars in parking lots, and restaurant reservations – with traditional data such as laboratory surveillance and hospitalization reports. This integration has provided valuable lead-time for understanding and modeling disease outbreaks, influencing decision-making processes.
This work was instrumental in contributing accurate and timely national and regional influenza forecasts to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention FluSight collaborative and has contributed to national and international efforts to forecast diseases such as Ebola, hantavirus, Middle East respiratory syndrome, chikungunya, and COVID-19.
Ramakrishnan’s work also has tackled the complex challenges of forecasting civil unrest and mass migrations, which require modeling human behavior at scale to capture emergent collective action. While prior projects all presented forecasting results on held-out test data, EMBERS was the first to forecast into the future with results scored after events are reported in the media. Among the events successfully forecast were the “Brazilian Spring,” student-led protests in Venezuela, protests stemming from the kidnappings and killings of student-teachers in Mexico, and protests in Paraguay against public-private partnership laws.
The underlying analysis and machine learning techniques pioneered by Ramakrishnan’s group through EMBERS and subsequent projects are now considered mainstream.
“Congratulations to Naren on being named an ACM fellow, a well-deserved recognition of his pioneering contributions to data science and machine learning. Beyond his groundbreaking research, Naren is a dedicated and conscientious teacher who has inspired countless students and colleagues, fostering success and innovation throughout our department," said Christine Julien, professor and head of the Department of Computer Science.
Based at Virginia Tech’s Innovation Campus in Alexandria, Ramakrishnan focuses his research on data science, applied machine learning, and urban analytics and is supported by numerous government agencies, companies, and national laboratories.
“Naren’s work with the Sanghani Center, highlighting AI [artificial intelligence] as a force for positive change, is an essential component of Virginia Tech’s growing research impact in Northern Virginia,” said Lance Collins, vice president and executive director of the Virginia Tech Innovation Campus. “His leadership in his field — and ability to anticipate what’s next — make him a tremendous role model to all our graduate students.”
Ramakrishnan’s work has been featured in many publications, including the National Institutes of Health outreach publication, Biomedical Computation Review, the National Science Foundation’s Discoveries series, the Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, Smithsonian Magazine, the Chronicle of Higher Education, and Popular Science.
Ramakrishnan is also a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, and the Asia-Pacific AI Association.
He received his master's degree from Anna University in India and a Ph.D. in computer science from Purdue University.
