Perception and LANguage (PLAN) Group
Our Perception and LANguage (PLAN) research lab is broadly interested in multimodal machine learning and learning with limited supervision. We are particularly interested in building intelligent task assistants that can fuse linguistic, visual, and other types of modalities to perceive and interact with the world. Current language + vision projects involve multimodal representation learning, contrastive self-supervision, embodied AI, video localization and multi-agent communication. Applications include healthcare, medical imaging, manufacturing and misinformation detection.

News
- May, 2023: 🎓 Congratulations to Avi, Gaurang, Hulya, and Meghana for graduating!
- May, 2023: Congratulations to Vedant Shah for receiving a David Heilman Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Research!
- April, 2023: Congratulations to Meghana Holla for being selected as the Master’s Paul E. Torgersen Research Excellence Award winner!
- April, 2023: Makanjuola is featured at VT Daily News as one of the eight recipients of the Cadence Black Students in Technology Scholarship!
- April, 2023: Thank you to the Virginia Tech Student Engineers’ Council (SEC) for the Big Contribution grant.
- Feb, 2023: Makanjuola is being featured in a spotlight article by Cadence with other recipients of the Cadence Black Students in Technology Scholarship. Congratulations to all recipients!
- Feb, 2023: Congratulations to our PLANBot team (Afrina, Muntasir, Makanjuola, Amarachi, and Joey) for being selected for the AlexaPrize TaskBot Challenge 2!
- Feb, 2023: Congratulations to Joey for his paper acceptance at TheWebConf2023 conference.
- Feb, 2023: Congratulations to Amarachi for her co-authored PLOS Digital Health editorial on ChatGPT and medical education.
- Nov, 2022: Congratulations to Makanjuola for receiving a 2022 Cadence Diversity in Technology Scholarship!
- Nov, 2022: Congratulations to Muntasir for receiving a VT Pratt Fellowship for the Spring 2023 semester!
- Oct, 2022: Congratulations to Amarachi and Ying for being nominated by the department for the TwoSigma Ph.D. Fellowship!
- Oct, 2022: Congratulations to Ying and Amarachi for being nominated by the department for the Google Ph.D. Fellowship!
- Oct, 2022: Congratulations to Muntasir and Avi for their paper acceptance at the 2022 IEEE BigData conference.
- Oct, 2022: Congratulations to Hesam Soleimani for his journal accepted at the Mechanical Systems and Signal Processing (MSSP).
- Oct, 2022: Our lab has received an Amazon-VT faculty research award to work on Embodied AI research!
- Sept, 2022: Congratulations to Gaurang and Amarachi for the MICCAI 2022 paper acceptance.
- August, 2022: Our lab has received DARPA KMASS funding!
- July, 2022: Our lab has received Commonwealth Cyber Initiative (CCI) funding on ML-based code repair!
- May, 2022: Congratulations to Amarachi’s department nomination for the Microsoft Ph.D. Fellowship!
- February, 2022: Our lab has received NSF EAGER CMMI-AM funding!
Funding
Our work is made possible by funding from several organizations.

Affiliations
Our lab is affiliated with several institutes.