Professor Anil Vullikanti, a faculty member in the Department of Computer Science and the Biocomplexity Institute at the University of Virginia, has recently been recognized with two major accolades for his influential research. His research interests are broadly in the areas of randomized algorithms, combinatorial optimization, distributed computing, dynamical systems and network science, machine learning, and AI, and their applications to epidemiology, public health and modeling, analysis and protection of critical infrastructures.
A paper co-authored by Professor Vullikanti, titled “Beating the News with EMBERS: Forecasting Civil Unrest Using Open Source Indicators,” has been selected for the 2025 ACM SIGKDD Applied Data Science Test of Time Award. This prestigious recognition will be presented at the KDD 2025 conference in Toronto, Canada, this August. The paper highlights innovative methods for predicting civil unrest using publicly available data sources.
In addition, Professor Vullikanti is a coauthor of “DIMPLES: Distributed Influence Maximization for Pandemic pLanning on Exascale Systems,” which received the Best Paper Award at ICS 2025, the 39th ACM International Conference on Supercomputing, held earlier this June. This work addresses scalable solutions for pandemic response planning using cutting-edge computational systems.
Congratulations to Professor Vullikanti and the researchers!