Short biography of Dr. Shawn Newsam

Dr. Shawn Newsam is a Professor of Computer Science and Engineering and Founding Faculty at the University of California, Merced. He joined UC Merced as a founding faculty in July of 2005 after being selected from a pool of over 13,000 applicants for one of 60 inaugural positions. He has degrees from UC Berkeley, UC Davis, and UC Santa Barbara, and did a postdoc in the Sapphire Scientific Data Mining group in the Center for Applied Scientific Computing at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory from 2003 to 2005. (So, UC Merced is his 5th UC institution!) Dr. Newsam is the recipient of a U.S. Department of Energy Early Career Scientist and Engineer Award, a U.S. National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award, and a U.S. Office of Science and Technology Policy Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE). He has held leadership positions in SIGSPATIAL, the ACM special interest group on the acquisition, management, and processing of spatially-related information, including serving as the general and program chair of its flagship conference and as the chair of the SIG. His research interests include computer vision and machine learning particularly applied to geographic data.