Three affiliate faculty to join Department

Niklas Elmqvist

Niklas Elmqvist is an associate professor in the iSchool (College of Information Studies) at University of Maryland, College Park. He received his Ph.D. in computer science in 2006 from Chalmers University in Gothenburg, Sweden, and has conducted research at Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, GA (Spring 2006), INRIA in Paris, France (Spring 2007), and Microsoft Research in Paris, France (2007-2008).

Prior to joining University of Maryland, he was an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at Purdue University in West Lafayette, IN. His research area is information visualization, human-computer interaction, and visual analytics. He is the recipient of an NSF CAREER award as well as best paper awards from the IEEE Information Visualization conference, the International Journal of Virtual Reality, and the ASME IDETC/CIE 2013 conference. He is an associate editor of the Information Visualization journal as well as co-editor of the Morgan Claypool Synthesis Lectures on Visualization.

His research has been funded by both federal agencies such as NSF and DHS as well as by companies such as Google, NVIDIA, and Microsoft. He is also the recipient of the Purdue Student Government Graduate Mentoring Award in 2014, a Ruth and Joel Spira Outstanding Teacher Award in 2012, and the Purdue ECE Chicago Alumni New Faculty award in 2010.

Vanessa Frias-Martinez

Vanessa Frias-Martinez is an assistant professor in the iSchool at the University of Maryland. She is interested in urban computing, with a focus on the intersection between big data and social development. She combines data mining and machine learning techniques to extract socially significant information from the digital traces of mobile and ubiquitous technologies.  Frias-Martinez received her M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from Columbia University. From 2009 to 2013, she was a researcher in the Data Mining and User Modeling Group at Telefonica Research in Madrid, Spain.

Richard Marciano

Richard Marciano is a professor in the College of Information Studies at the University of Maryland and director of the newly formed Digital Curation Innovation Center (DCIC).  He comes from the School of Information and Library Science (SILS) at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, where he served as professor and director of the Sustainable Archives and Leveraging Technologies (SALT) lab.  Prior to that, he conducted research at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at the University of California San Diego for over a decade with an affiliation in the Division of Social Sciences in the Urban Studies and Planning program.  His research interests center on digital preservation, sustainable archives, cyberinfrastructure, and big data.  He is currently the U. Maryland lead on a $10.5M 2013-2018 NSF/DIBBs implementation grant with the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the U. of Illinois Urbana-Champaign called "Brown Dog".  He holds degrees in Avionics and Electrical Engineering, a Master's and Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Iowa, and conducted a Postdoc in Computational Geography.