Web science is now an important area of teaching and research. The Department of Information Science, University of Arkansas at Little Rock, is pleased to announce that an extensive search for a new Web Science faculty member is complete, and Nitin Agarwal of Arizona State University will join us as an Assistant Professor beginning Fall, 2009. Agarwal’s primary research interests are in social computing, knowledge extraction in social media, and the Web 2.0. He is bringing these research interests directly to teaching. For example, he played a major role in developing a course on “Social Computing and Web Analytics.” And as one of the authors of a soon-to-be-completed book on Web science, Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery in Blogs, he plans to bring his experience at the leading edge of Web research to a wider audience.
Nitin Agarwal expects to be awarded the Ph.D. before beginning his duties at UALR. He already has published four journal papers, nine conference papers, four book chapters, and submitted four other papers. These have appeared in such prestigious forums as ACM Transactions on Knowledge Discovery from Data, and the International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining. He was recently recognized as an Outstanding PhD Student finalist by the School of Computing and Informatics at Arizona State University.
UALR’s Department of Information Science expects its students to benefit directly from Agarwal’s teaching and research expertise in the form of new courses and projects at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. He will complement a department with curriculum, teaching and research interests in Web science, information quality, virtual reality, e-commerce, bioinformatics, and business applications.