Carolina Cruz-Niera
The University of Arkansas at Little Rock is becoming a national player in the realm of virtual reality.
Last year, it hired Carolina Cruz-Niera, a leading VR expert and inventor of state-of-the-art VR technology, to lead its Emerging Analytics Center. Last week, the EAC showcased its two VR student projects during Supercomputing 2015 (SC15), an international conference for high-performance computing, networking, storage and analysis held in Austin, Texas.
Cruz-Niera was lured to Arkansas through the Arkansas Research Alliance Scholars program, which seeks to bring world-class scientists to the state’s research universities.
The Supercomputing conference is a big one, attracting more than 10,000 scientists and techies from across the globe. Participation is considered a prestigious feather in the cap. UALR earned similar feathers earlier this year when Cruz-Niera presented at the international Virtual Reality Summit in Santa Clara, California, alongside firms and schools such as Adobe and the University of Southern California. This past summer, she led a UALR contingent to another international conference in France.
Cruz-Niera said EAC’s expertise is in “bringing virtual reality to the high-performing computing community and opening research opportunities aligned with current trends in visualization.”
“Virtual reality is much more than fun and games; it is a powerful tool for scientific research, discovery and learning,” she said. “It is exciting to see UALR becoming part of the leading community in high-performance computing and having a visible contribution to SC2015 and showcasing the talent of our students and faculty.”
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