Vikram Mohanty

Biography

My research focuses on developing and studying novel tools that leverage the complementary strengths of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Collective Human Intelligence for solving complex, open-ended problems.

I am a 5th year PhD student in the Department of Computer Science at Virginia Tech. I work at the Crowd Intelligence Lab, where I am advised by Dr. Kurt Luther.

I developed Civil War Photo Sleuth, a web-based platform for identifying portraits from the American Civil War era. As part of my research, I study 1) how crowdsourced human expertise and facial recognition can be combined to support historical photo identification, 2) how novice crowds and face recognition can assist experts in picking the correct match from a set of similar-looking candidates, 3) how crowds and AI can help in assessing and verifying the quality of historical photo IDs, and 4) how the underlying AI model affects user behavior in the context of historical photo identification. For my research, I have won the Microsoft Cloud AI Research Challenge Grand Prize (2018), the ACM IUI Best Paper (2019) award and the AAAI HCOMP Best Poster/Demo (2018) award.

I have worked as a research intern at VSCO and Dataminr. Prior to this, I completed my undergraduate from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur.