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Abby Stylianou, Ph.D.

Assistant Professor
Department of Computer Science

Courses Taught

CSCI 1070 Introduction to Computer Science: Taming Big Data, CSCI 4710 Databases, CSCI 5710 Databases, CSCI 4930 Special Topics: Deep Learning, CSCI 5760 Deep Learning

Education

  • Ph.D. in Computer Science, Washington University in St. Louis
  • M.S. in Computer Science, Washington University in St. Louis
  • B.A. in Environmental Studies/Geoscience, Washington University in St. Louis

Dr. Stylianou's research has focused on building very large datasets of images and their metadata, and the deep learning approaches to digest and understand those datasets for a variety of tasks. These tasks include performing hotel-specific image retrieval in order to locate victims of sex trafficking who have been photographed in hotels, making measurements of the natural environment in time-lapse imagery to understand climate change, and observing how individuals interact with the world around them in outdoor webcam images to support better design of the built environment. She is particularly interested in how motivated communities of non-experts can participate in the collection of these datasets and what artifacts and challenges are introduced by capturing data from such diverse populations. She additionally works to understand how computer vision and machine learning solutions to complex geometric and image retrieval problems can be made accessible and understandable to non-technical individuals, such as citizen journalists and law enforcement investigators, through software interfaces designed specifically with non-experts in mind.

Research Interests

  • Image Processing
  • Deep Learning
  • Citizen Science