Professor Claudio Silva named a fellow of the ACM, the world's largest computer-science society
Claudio Silva — an Institute Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at NYU Tandon and a Professor of Data Science; co-founder of both the Center for Data Science and the Center for Urban Science + Progress; and co-director of the Visualization and Data Analytics Research Center (VIDA) — has been named as a fellow of the Association for Computer Machining (ACM), in recognition of his contributions to scientific and information visualization and to geometric computing.
ACM Fellow is the organization’s most prestigious member grade, recognizing the top 1% of ACM members for their outstanding accomplishments in computing and information technology and/or outstanding service to ACM and the larger computing community.
Silva’s seminal research has had a broad impact in various application areas and has led to numerous innovative methods and practical systems.
He has won particular renown for his work on Urban Computing. His first paper in the area, “Visual Exploration of Big Spatio-Temporal Urban Data: A Study of New York City Taxi Trips,” focused on a particularly important urban data set: taxi trips, which can provide unprecedented insight into many different aspects of city life, from economic activity and human behavior to mobility patterns. This paper received the 2023 IEEE VIS Test of Time Award in 2023 as a landmark in urban data visualization for several truly impressive contributions, including query language developments and the seamless integration of data querying to handle real-world, large-scale data. It has garnered many citations in visualization, urban planning, and transportation journals, making a clear impact within and outside the visualization community. At VIDA and Tandon, the paper laid the groundwork for many other research questions, including the use of GPUs to support interactive analysis of spatial data, novel visual representations, the study of urban environments in 3D, the automated creation of side-walk maps, and practical applications aimed, for example, at advancing an understanding of the soundscape of New York City (SONYC) and the role of sunlight and shadows in determining the environmental quality of public spaces, leading to insights that inform city planning and government policy.
Silva, who was made a fellow of the IEEE in 2013, is one of the few figures at Tandon to receive an Emmy Award from the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences. That honor came in 2018, for his development of a visual analytics tool used in Major League Baseball (MLB) stadiums across the country. In combination with a radar-based ball-tracking system and an optical player-tracking solution, Silva’s tool produces highly interactive visualizations of the game in unprecedented detail, lending the ability to analyze each and every play on the field for the first time in sports history — and allowing fans and industry officials to answer previously unanswerable analytics questions like where players should be positioned to best catch a ball traveling at a particular velocity or which players are most likely to accurately anticipate a pitch’s trajectory.
His more recent research activities include co-developing an interactive visual analytics tool, ARGUS (Augmented Reality Guidance and User-Modeling System), engineered to support the creation of intelligent AR assistants that can guide people through tasks as varied as intricate surgeries or everyday food preparation; proposing HuBar, a novel tool designed to summarize and compare task performance sessions in AR — such as AR-guided simulated flights, to name one example — through the analysis of performer behavior and cognitive workload; and creating OSCUR (Open-Source Cyberinfrastructure for Urban Computing Research), an open-source platform that aims to make complex urban data more accessible and usable, potentially leading to smarter, more sustainable cities.
In another recent project, which made waves in the museum world, Silva and his team developed PaleoScan, a portable, affordable device that can quickly capture high-resolution images of fossils. PaleoScan aims to make fossil data from resource-poor museums accessible to scientists worldwide, potentially reducing fossil trafficking.
The holder of 13 patents, he has co-authored more than 350 peer-reviewed papers in leading conferences and journals (20 of them award-winning), and Google Scholar shows that collectively, they have been cited over 28,000 times with an H-index of 77.
I’m proud to see the ACM, the world’s largest professional society for computer science, bestow this fellowship on Professor Silva. He is richly deserving of that distinction. He has helped make NYU Tandon a respected hub of data visualization research, and the dozens of Ph.D. students and postdocs he has advised have gone on to distinguished careers in academia and industry, increasing his impact. I offer him my deepest congratulations.”
— Juan de Pablo, Executive Vice President for Global Science and Technology and NYU Tandon’s Executive Dean
Silva joins a list of other NYU Tandon faculty members who hold ACM fellowships, including Leonard J. Shustek Professor of Computer Science Martin Farach-Colton, who chairs the Department of Computer Science and Engineering; Institute Professor Juliana Freire, who co-directs VIDA; and Dennis Shasha, who co-directs the Tandon-based NYU WIRELESS.
The ACM will formally recognize Silva and the other 2024 fellows at its annual Awards Banquet on June 14, 2025, in San Francisco. Additional information about the 2024 cohort, as well as previously named ACM fellows, is available at ACM Awards.
