Naren Ramakrishnan

Naren Ramakrishnan is the Thomas L. Phillips Professor of Engineering and leads AI and machine learning for the Institute for Advanced Computing. He directs the Sanghani Center for AI and Data Analytics and the Amazon-Virginia Tech Initiative in Efficient and Robust Machine Learning.

Ramakrishnan’s research interests span data science, ML, forecasting, urban analytics, recommender systems, and computational epidemiology. Over the course of his career, he has mentored 38 PhD students and 26 MS students in these areas, who have gone on to positions in industry, startups, and academia.  Ramakrishnan and his students have received more than 10 Best Paper Awards at leading data mining, AI, and data science conferences, an ACM SIGKDD Test of Time Award, and a Deployed Application Award from IAAI.

Ramakrishnan’s work has been supported by AIRC, ARO, DARPA, DHS, DOE, DOT&E, DTRA, IARPA, ICWERX, NEH, NIH, NSF, NSWC, ODNI, ONR, Amazon, Boeing, Ford, General Dynamics, General Motors, HP Labs, L3 Communications, Lockheed Martin, Mayfair Group, NEC Labs, Northrop Grumman, Rolls-Royce, Verisign, The Washington Post, and World Forest ID. His research has been featured in the NIH outreach publication Biomedical Computation Review, the National Science Foundation's Discoveries series, Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, Smithsonian Magazine, Popular Science, The Economist, Chronicle of Higher Education, and ACM TechNews.

Ramakrishnan is a fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE).