RET Mentors
Research Experiences in Big Data and Machine/Deep Learning for OK STEM Teachers
Dr. Johnson Thomas
Dr. Thomas received his PhD from the University of Reading, England. His research interests include security and privacy, cognitive computing, human health, and big data.
Dr. Rittika Shamsuddin
Dr. Rittika Shamsuddin aims to improve communication between researchers in fields of computer science, biology, and medicine via knowledge-sharing and by developing algorithms and experiments, which will increase the interpretability and generalizing ability of various machine learning and artificial intelligence models. Such libraries and developments are necessary for extending the technological success of computational fields to solve problems in healthcare/biology with a higher degree of trustworthiness and reliability than exists at present. She has multiple internal grants, published papers and is active in service.
Dr. Shamsuddin is also very passionate about computer science and programming and has been an active advocate for CS, especially among women, since her Ph.D. years. She believes that programming is a way of thinking and can be taught and learned through the use of the newer technology-based curriculum.
She obtained her Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Dallas on Analyzing and Synthesizing Healthcare Time Series Data for Decision-Support, where she worked in the Multimedia Systems Laboratory led by Prof. Balakrishnan. Before that, she graduated from Mount Holyoke College, with a double major in Biology and Computer Science, where her honor thesis included working on Using Rigidity Analysis To Identify Hinge Motion in Proteins under the supervision of Professor Audrey St. John.
Dr. Arunkumar Bagavathi
Dr. Bagavathi received his B.S. from Anna University in 2014 and his Ph.D from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte in 2019. For his thesis, he developed models to extract actionable patterns to support human decisions. He developed these models with distributed computing frameworks like Apache Hadoop and Spark to support big data. His focus is mainly on social networks. He worked on modeling hate speech evolution and their diffusion dynamics in social media. He also worked on building a framework to extract features from Multiplex or Multiview networks. His favorite part of his research is to generating innovative ideas to analyze and extract knowledge from massive datasets.
One of his hobbies is practicing to run long distances. His goal is to run a marathon (26.2 miles) in 3 hours.
Dr. Sharmin Jahan
Dr. Jahan received her Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Tulsa in 2021. Her research interest is in information security, self-protecting systems, and secure service mesh.