Nitin Agarwal of Arizona State University will join UALR’s Department of Information Science in the Donaghey College of Engineering and Information Technology this fall, lending his extensive research experience in social computing, knowledge extraction in social media, and Web 2.0.

“He is bringing these research interests directly to teaching. He has played a major role in developing a course on Social Computing and Web Analytics,” said Daniel Berleant, search committee chair.

Agarwal will receive a Ph.D. from Arizona State prior to beginning his career at UALR in the fall. He is one of the authors of the soon-to-be-released 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,” Berleant said.

Agarwal has published four journal papers, nine conference papers,and 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 recently was recognized as an Outstanding Ph.D. student finalist by the School of Computing and Informatics at Arizona State.

“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,” said department chair Elizabeth Pierce. “Agarwal will complement the department’s curriculum, teaching and research interests in web science, information quality, technology foresight, virtual reality, e-commerce, bioinformatics, and information applications.”