Science on Tap to feature talk on devices, data and their connections

Niklas Elmqvist Download Photo

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. - A Purdue University researcher will highlight the ubiquitous nature of today's device-driven society and the obsession with data interaction.

Niklas Elmqvist, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering and a 2013 National Science Foundation Career Award winner, will speak at 6 p.m. April 25 as part of the Science on Tap series. The event, which is free and open to those 21 and older, will be in the upstairs of the Lafayette Brewing Company, 622 Main St., Lafayette.

Elmqvist's talk, "Ubiquitous Analytics: Interacting with Data Anywhere, Anytime," is sponsored by the Purdue School of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Discovery Park.

Computing is becoming increasingly embedded in our everyday lives, driven by smaller yet more powerful mobile devices and larger and less expensive displays. Through advances in technology, physical environments are now able to accommodate an increasing number of digital processors, he said.

"The data deluge has never been greater, and people need to leverage all of this digital infrastructure to stay afloat," Elmqvist said. "In this talk, I will present a concept called ubiquitous analytics, which is staking out a new digital future of ever-present, always-on computing - one that can support manipulating, thinking about and interacting with data anytime, anywhere."

Elmqvist's research focuses on information visualization, human-computer interaction and visual analytics. In addition to the NSF Career Award, he won the Ruth and Joel Spira Outstanding Teacher Award in 2012 and the Purdue ECE Chicago Alumni New Faculty Award in 2010.

He also has received Google research awards in 2009 and 2010 and two best paper awards from premier venues in his field. The NSF, U.S. Department of Homeland Security, as well as Google, SAP and NVidia are sponsors of his work.

Elmqvist also is a co-primary investigator of Purdue-led Visual Analytics for Command, Control and Interoperability Environments, the U.S. Homeland Security Center of Excellence known as VACCINE, and a member of ACM, IEEE and IEEE Computer Society.

He received his doctorate in 2006 from Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg, Sweden. Before joining Purdue in 2008, he was a postdoctoral researcher at INRIA, a public research institute in Paris that specializes in computational sciences, and a visiting scholar at Georgia Institute of Technology.

Science on Tap, led by Purdue graduate students Patrick Dolan and Becca Scott, provides Purdue faculty and collaborating researchers the opportunity to share research activities in an informal setting with presentations that are designed to appeal to a more general audience.

Attendance at the monthly event has averaged 80 during the program's first two years.

Writer: Phillip Fiorini, 765-496-3133, pfiorini@purdue.edu

Sources: Niklas Elmqvist, 765-494-0364, elm@purdue.edu