Jan P. Springer, an associate professor in the Department of Computer Science, has been named director of the George W. Donaghey Emerging Analytics Center at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock.
Springer is taking over for Carolina Cruz-Neira, Ph. D., now a professor of computer science at the University of Central Florida.
Under Springer’s leadership, the university said research and industry projects in the center will focus on immersive visualization, multimodal augmented reality/virtual reality applications, cybersecurity and Internet of Things.
He will manage about 45 student researchers, from undergraduates to Ph.D. students, as well as four full-time employees. The center also supports six faculty fellows.
Springer joined the UA Little Rock faculty in 2018, after spending the previous six years as an assistant professor of computer science at the University of Hull in the United Kingdom.
He also has experience working as a research scientist with the CREATE group at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, the Virtual Reality Systems Group at Bauhaus-Universität Weimar and the former VR Research group at the Fraunhofer IMK. The latter two are in his native Germany.
Springer holds a master’s degree and Ph.D. in computer science from Bauhaus-Universität Weimar. He has worked on virtual-reality systems for modeling and simulation in areas such as cluster-based displays, multi-viewer stereo, software frameworks and interactive high-quality rendering.
