The appointment of
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The Virginia Tech Board of Visitors has conferred the Thomas L. Phillips Professorship of Engineering to Naren Ramakrishnan of computer science. The Raytheon Corporation created the Thomas L. Phillips Endowed Professorship in 1992 in honor of its retired chief executive officer (1968 – 1991) and chair of its board of directors (1975 – 1991). Phillips received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in electrical engineering from Virginia Tech in 1947 and in 1948, respectively. He joined Raytheon upon his graduation as an electronics design engineer. Ramakrishnan is a highly visible and very productive member of the data mining community. Data mining is a set of techniques for making sense of large volumes of data across areas as disparate as, for example, biological experimental findings, financial analysis, sensor data from traffic monitors, and epidemiological data from across the country. At Virginia Tech, Ramakrishnan directs the Discovery Analytics Center where faculty and students study knowledge discovery problems in important areas of national interest, including intelligence analysis, sustainability, neuroscience, and systems biology. Ramakrishnan is a past recipient of a National Science Foundation CAREER grant, the New Century Technology Council Innovation award,and the Alumni Award for Excellence in Research by Virginia Tech. In 2007, he was named one of Computerworld’s “40 innovative IT people to watch, under the age of 40,” for his research on the data mining concept of “storytelling.” The National Science Foundation, Department of Homeland Security, National Institutes of Health, National Endowment for the Humanities, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, Office of Naval Research, General Motors, Hewlett-Packard Labs, NEC Labs, and Advance Auto Parts have funded Ramakrishnan’s research. Ramakrishnan is a distinguished scientist of the Association for Computing Machinery, and member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers’ Computer Society, and the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence. He received his master’s degree from Anna University in India and a Ph.D. from Purdue University, which named him a “40 under 40” alumnus in 2010. |
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