[Asis-l] Maryland's iSchool Welcomes New Faculty

[Mary E. Carroll-Mason]

Maryland's iSchool Welcomes New Faculty

The University of Maryland's College of Information Studies, Maryland's iSchool, welcomed four new faculty members this semester:

Dr. Richard Marciano, professor and director of the newly-formed Digital Curation Laboratory, has joined the iSchool 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 for the last five years. Prior to that, he spent over a decade at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) where he conducted research and maintained an affiliation in the Division of Social Sciences in the Urban Studies and Planning program. 

Marciano's research interests center on digital preservation, sustainable archives, cyberinfrastructure, and big data. He has led the development of projects funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), National Institutes of Health (NIH), Department of Defense, Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), Library of Congress, and the Mellon Foundation. 

He was the recipient of the August 2008 "J. Franklin Jameson Archival Advocacy Award" by the Society of American Archivists, and was awarded a 2012 Round Two JISC/IMLS Digging into Data award with the University of California, Berkeley and the University of Liverpool on data mining of big humanities and social science data.  He was also the principal investigator of the 2010-2013 NARA/NSF CI-BER project (CyberInfrastructure for Billions of Electronic Records), and is currently the University of  Maryland lead on a $10.5M 2013-2018 NSF/DIBBs implementation grant with the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign called "Brown Dog". 

"I'm excited to have joined the Maryland faculty to launch the Digital Curation Lab," says Marciano. "This will help provide real-world digital curation experiences for students and professionals, and I look forward to developing new partnerships on campus and in the Washington, DC, metro area."

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 postdoctoral fellowship in computational geography.

Recent publications: 'Big Historical Data' Feature Extraction, Richard Marciano, Robert Allen, Chien-Yi Hou, and Pamela Lach, Journal of Map & Geography, Working Digitally with Historical Maps theme issue, Vol. 9, Issue 1-2, 2013.
Integrating Data Mining and Data Management Technologies for Scholarly Inquiry, Ray Larson, Paul Watry, Richard Marciano, John Harrison, Chien-Yi Hou, Luis Aguilar, Shreyas, and Jerome Fuselier, Big Humanities Data workshop, Oct. 27, 2014, Bethesda, MD.

Dr. Niklas Elmqvist, associate professor and program director for the Master of Science in Human-Computer Interaction, came to the iSchool from Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, where he was an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering. He received his Ph.D. in computer science in 2006 from Chalmers University in Gothenburg, Sweden, and has held research positions at Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, GA, INRIA in Paris, France, and Microsoft Research in Paris, France.

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. 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.

"I'm looking forward to leveraging the iSchool's unique position in Washington, DC, as well as its excellent world-class faculty to study the use of visualization and HCI for preparing citizens for the data-rich society of today as well as tomorrow," Elmqvist says.

Recent publications: S. K. Badam, E. R. Fisher, N. Elmqvist. Munin: A Peer-to-Peer Middleware for Ubiquitous Analytics and Visualization Spaces. IEEE Transactions on Visualization & Computer Graphics, to appear, 2014.

S. K. Badam, N. Elmqvist. PolyChrome: A Cross-Device Framework for Collaborative Web Visualization. In Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Interactive Tabletops and Surfaces, to appear, 2014.

Dr. Andrea Wiggins, assistant professor, comes to the iSchool after recently completing a postdoctoral fellowship with DataONE and the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, focused on data management practices in citizen science. She is an interdisciplinary researcher who studies the design and evolution of sociotechnical systems for large-scale collaboration and knowledge production, bringing together broader research interests open knowledge, data-intensive science, distributed collaboration, and social computing. 

Wiggins's current research on open knowledge systems focuses on two topics: public participation in data-intensive scientific collaboration, and data life cycles and ecosystems. She is interested in how technologies can support collaboration, in both professional research communities and by engaging the public in meaningful real-world research through citizen science projects. Wiggins serves on several working groups and advisory boards for citizen science projects across a variety of scientific disciplines. 

Andrea Wiggins is the principal investigator on a new citizen science collaboration with the Smithsonian Institution, recently funded through the National Science Foundation's Cyber-Enabled Sustainability Science and Engineering (CyberSEES) program. In this project, conducted with iSchool dean and professor Jennifer Preece, she will be testing data standards and other technologies used in a citizen science initiative that engages up to 300 K-12 science classrooms across the United States in sustainability research. "I'm looking forward to getting involved in research with iSchool faculty and students, starting with the NSF-supported project that Jenny Preece and I are launching next semester," she says. "I'm also excited about contributing to the Archives and Digital Curation specialization because it represents an increasingly valuable knowledge base and skill set for our students, and it will let me bring my research on data management into the classroom."

She earned her PhD in Information Science & Technology from Syracuse University, a Master of Science in Information from the University of Michigan, and a bachelor's degree in mathematics from Alma College.

Recent publications: Bonney, R., Shirk, J., Phillips, T., Wiggins, A., Ballard, H., Miller-Rushing, A., & Parrish, J. (March 2014). Next Steps for Citizen Science. Science. 343(6178):1436-1437. http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.1251554.

Hammock, J. & Wiggins, A. (2014). Connecting diverse communities through citizen science data infrastructure. "Citizen + X" workshop, AAAI Conference on Human Computation & Crowdsourcing. Pittsburgh, PA, 2 November, 2014.

Wiggins, A., Lagoze, C., Wong, W.-K., & Kelling, S. (2014). A sensor network approach to managing data quality in citizen science. "Citizen + X" workshop, AAAI Conference on Human Computation & Crowdsourcing. Pittsburgh, PA, 2 November, 2014.

Dr. Kathleen Weaver, lecturer, will be teaching and serving as external relations coordinator with the Master of Information Management (MIM) program at the iSchool. Weaver completed her PhD in Human Centered Computing from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC). Her research focuses on utilizing computerized conversation agents to conduct cognitive assessments, such as learning style assessments. She also received a master's degree in instructional systems development with a certificate in instructional technology from UMBC.

Weaver has taught and trained in a variety of settings for the past 25 years, including universities, community colleges, private colleges, elementary schools, public libraries, military commands, and large and small corporations. She also has extensive experience in information management, including both industry and government settings. She has been part of six implementations of Systems, Applications, and Products (SAP), where she focused on information assurance, quality assurance, and user management. 

"One of my goals as the MIM program's external relations coordinator is to connect professionals all across the world with the iSchool," she says. "In my teaching and mentoring, I focus on helping students gain an in-depth understanding of information management processes, providing them with the skills they need to transform the way organizations use and connect with information."

Recent publications: Weaver K., Komlodi, A., Duffy B., (In Press) Enhancing Embodied Conversation Agents with Initial Inventories. The International Journal of Assessment and Evaluation.

Weaver K. (2014) Cognitive Assessments Conducted by a Computerized Intelligent Interviewer. In Abstracts of the Lilly Conference on College and University Teaching. Bethesda, MD, May 29 - June 1.