Naren Ramakrishnan is the Thomas L. Phillips Professor at Virginia Tech and leads AI & Machine Learning Research for Virginia Tech’s Innovation Campus. He is the founding director of the Sanghani Center for AI and Data Analytics and the Amazon-Virginia Tech Initiative in Efficient and Robust Machine Learning.

Naren’s research interests span data science, forecasting, urban analytics, recommender systems, and computational epidemiology. He and his students have received more than ten Best Paper Awards at leading data mining, AI, and data science conferences. Over the course of his career, he has mentored 36 PhD students and 22 MS students, who have gone on to prominent positions in industry, startups, and academia.

Naren’s work has been supported by AIRC, Army Research Office, 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, The Washington Post, and Verisign. 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.

Naren 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).