Claudio Silva, professor of computer science and engineering and member of the Visualization, Imaging, and Data Analysis (VIDA) research center at the New York University Tandon School of Engineering, was inducted into the inaugural cohort of the IEEE Visualization Academy (Vis Academy) during the opening session of The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Visualization Conference (IEEE VIS 2019) in Vancouver, BC, on Tuesday, October 22, 2019.

Induction into the Academy is among the highest and most prestigious honors in the field of visualization. Silva, who has held positions at AT&T, IBM, Lawrence Livermore, Sandia, and the University of Utah, has made numerous contributions to the field, in areas ranging from point-based modeling to surface reconstruction, visibility computations, and urban data visualization. {module In-article}

Established in 2018 by the IEEE Visualization and Graphics Technical Committee, the Academy chose as its first members Visualization Career Awardees and Visualization Technical Achievement Awardees from 2004 to 2019, making it a veritable A-list or hall of fame for those in the field. (Silva won the Technical Achievement Award, given only to those who have made seminal contributions to the field, in 2014.)

With over 200 journal and conference papers, Silva holds 12 U.S. patents and is the co-author of 12 papers that have received "Best Paper Awards" at visualization and geometric computing conferences. He has over 9,900 citations according to Google Scholar.

Silva has contributed to such large-scale technology projects as:

• VisTrails, an open-source scientific workflow and provenance management system that supports data exploration and visualization, whose development helped earn Silva a Technical Achievement Award
• Integrated Analytics and Visualization for Multi-Modality Transportation, a new research project in collaboration with NYU Tandon's C2SMART University Transportation Center that examines pedestrian dynamics using tens of millions of images produced by the Brooklyn- based startup Carmera
• UV-CDAT (Community Data Analysis Tools), a novel climate data analysis tool that won the 2015 Federal Laboratory Consortium Interagency Partnership Award
• Major League Baseball's Statcast player tracking system, which won the Alpha Award for Best Analytics Innovation/Technology at the 2015 MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, and for which Silva won a 2018 Technology and Engineering Emmy Award from the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences
• TaxiVis, an innovative open-source tool for analyzing complex spatial-temporal urban data being used by the NYC Department of Transportation and the Taxi and Limousine Commission (TLC)

Silva is affiliated with several of the top research centers at NYU, including the Courant Institute for Mathematical Sciences, the Center for Data Science (CDS), the Center for Urban Science and Progress (CUSP), the Center for Advanced Technology in Telecommunications (CATT), and C2SMART (Connected Cities with Smart Transportation). The National Science Foundation, the Department of Education, AT&T, IBM, and the Sloan Foundation are among the many funders of his research.

"Claudio Silva's influence in the field of data visualization speaks not only for the reputation of his own research but to the wide recognition he and the VIDA center have garnered as collaborators," said Jelena Kovacevic, Dean of the NYU Tandon School of Engineering. "Claudio and the entire VIDA Center team really are exemplars of how alliances between departments, other NYU schools, the city and beyond are driving breakthroughs at NYU Tandon in artificial intelligence, data science, health, urban science, and other vital areas of research."