Brief Bio
Dr. Nirmalya Thakur is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. Prior to joining South Dakota Mines, he worked as an Assistant Teaching Professor of Computer Science at Emory University for two years. His research interests include Big Data, Data Analysis, Human-Computer Interaction, Machine Learning, and Natural Language Processing. He has published over 50 peer-reviewed papers in leading conferences and journals. He completed his PhD at the University of Cincinnati, where he received numerous accolades, including the Dean's Fellowship, the Distinguished Thesis Award, the Interdisciplinary Research Fellowship, the Risk Management Awareness Award, and the Engineer of the Month Award. He has been featured on the cover page of Millennium Magazine, in the American Scientist Magazine, on Yahoo News, on Business Insider, and on multiple other news outlets for his contributions to the field of Computer Science. To learn more about his work, please visit his personal site.
Research Expertise
Dr. Thakur's research has focused on addressing the needs of the elderly population through the development of intelligent, assistive, pervasive, and adaptive technologies to contribute towards healthy aging, independent living, and improved quality of life in the future of IoT-based Smart Homes. He has also worked on mining, analyzing, and interpreting the multimodal components of conversations on social media platforms related to various issues of global concern with a specific focus on virus outbreaks, such as COVID-19, MPox, and Disease X, through the lens of topic modeling, misinformation analysis, sentiment analysis, subjectivity analysis, and toxicity analysis. Dr. Thakur has advised several students who have co-authored papers in professional journals such as the Journal of Future Internet, Journal of Computers, Journal of Data, Journal of Computation, and in different international conferences such as HCII, IHIET, CSSE, and IHIET-AI. To learn more about his research group, please visit DDIHTS.
Teaching
Dr. Thakur has experience teaching a wide range of courses in Computer Science, such as Data Mining Theory, Machine Learning Applications, Introduction to Artificial Intelligence, Analysis of Algorithms, Foundations of Computer Science, Introduction to Computer Science I, Artificial Intelligence and Computational Decision Making, and Programming for ECE.