Stanford Seminar - Anytime Anywhere All At Once: Data Analytics in the Metaverse

Niklas Elmqvist of University of Maryland, College Park November 11, 2022 Mobile computing, virtual and augmented reality, and the internet of things (IoT) have transformed the way we interact with computers. Artificial intelligence and machine learning have unprecedented potential for amplifying human abilities. But how have these technologies impacted data analysis, and how will they cause data analysis to change in the future? In this talk, I will review my group's sustained efforts of going beyond the mouse and the keyboard into the "metaverse" of analytics: large-scale, distributed, ubiquitous, immersive, and increasingly mobile forms of data analytics augmented and amplified by AI/ML models. I will also present my vision for the fundamental theories, applications, design studies, technologies, and frameworks we will need to fulfill the vast potential of this exciting new area in the future. About the speaker: Niklas Elmqvist (he/him/his) is a full 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. Prior to joining University of Maryland, he was an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at Purdue University in West Lafayette, IN. From 2016 to 2021, he served as the director of the Human-Computer Interaction Laboratory (HCIL) at University of Maryland, one of the oldest and most well-known HCI research labs in the United States. 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 ACM CHI conference, the International Journal of Virtual Reality, and the ASME IDETC/CIE conference. He was papers co-chair for IEEE InfoVis 2016, 2017, and 2020, as well as a subcommittee chair for ACM CHI 2020 and 2021. He is also a past associate e