Faculty Spotlight: Ricky Sethi
Ricky J. Sethi, Ph.D., originally emigrated with his family from India to California. Ricky pursued his undergraduate degree at the University of California, Berkeley (UCB), where he studied Neurobiology, Physics, and English. He then went on to complete his Master's in Physics and Business (Information Systems) at the University of Southern California (USC). During that time, he joined a couple of successful startups in the technology industry. He returned to school to complete his Ph.D. in Computer Science, with a concentration in Artificial Intelligence and Computer Vision at the University of California, Riverside (UCR).
Ricky became a Post-Doctoral Scholar at UCR, where he was the Lead Integration Scientist for the WASA project and participated in ONR's Empire Challenge 10. He was selected by the National Science Foundation (NSF)/Computing Research Associates (CRA) as a Computing Innovation Fellow, where he worked at both the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and USC's Information Sciences Institute (ISI where the Domain Name System (DNS) was invented. In 2014, Ricky was offered a position as a Research Scientist at UMass Medical Center/UMass Amherst. Shortly after moving to Massachusetts, he accepted a position at Fitchburg State University (FSU) to pursue an academic career, which allowed him to combine his love of teaching and research.
His research projects tend to be interdisciplinary and use fundamental ideas from machine learning, computational science, and physics. His research spans the areas of 1). Social Computing - fact-checking misinformation and virtual communities for science learning, 2). Data Science - scientific workflows for multimedia analysis in digital humanities and reproducibility, and 3). Computer Vision/Multimedia - physics-based methods for group analysis in video. In 2016, along with his FSU colleague, Catherine Buell, and their colleague from Bates College, William Seeley, he was awarded a Digital Humanities grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) to study scientific workflows and visual stylometry.
Ricky has authored or co-authored over 30 peer-reviewed papers, book chapters, and reports and made numerous presentations on his research in machine learning, computer vision, social computing, and data science. He has taught courses in Computer Science, Physics, and General Science. Ricky has also mentored undergraduate, graduate, and postdoctoral students at UCLA, USC, and UMass. Ricky has served as a Panelist for several NSF programs, an Editorial Board Member for the International Journal of Computer Vision & Signal Processing, and a Program Committee member for various conferences.
Ricky's textbook, Essential Computational Thinking: Computer Science from Scratch, follows a CS0 breadth-first approach and is most appropriate for highly-motivated undergraduates and non-CS graduate students and professionals. His latest book project is a new research text with the publisher, Frontiers in Big Data, on "Identifying, Tracking, and Fact-Checking Misinformation." He is collaborating with leading scientists in the area of fact-checking misinformation, including Md. Atiqur Rahman Ahad (Osaka University), Onur Varol (Sabancı University), and Prashant Shiralkar (Amazon). His next book project will be entitled, "Data Science, The Easy Way," and will be situated in the magical land of Carmorra, first discovered by Douglas Downing!
Be sure to stop by the Faculty Spotlight display near the Library entrance next time you visit us in person. To explore more of the amazing research and scholarship produced by Fitchburg State faculty, check out our Faculty Publications guide here: fitchburgstate.libguides.com/FacultyBooks