Silvia Nittel

Office: 334 Boardman Hall

Lab: 321 Boardman Hall

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Geosensor Networks Lab

Dr. Nittel is the Director of the UMaine Data Science and Engineering program and the Graduate Program Coordinator of 7 Graduate programs in the Spatial Computing group.

Dr. Nittel is the director of the Geosensor Networks Lab at the University of Maine. She is a recipient of a NSF Early CAREER award, and her research has been  funded with grants from NSF, NGA, NASA and the Maine National Guard. From 2005-2012, she served on the executive committee of the Sensor Science, Engineering and Informatics IGERT at the University of Maine. She is the co-founder of the conference series “Geosensor Networks”, author of 2 books on Geosensor Networks, and the author and editor of several encyclopedias entries on the topic of “geosensor networks”; she has given several international keynotes and invited talks on the topic.

Research interests

Dr. Silvia Nittel’s research interests are in data management technology for geosensor networks, wireless sensor networks and sensor data streams. She received her Ph.D. in 1994 from the Computer Science Department of the University of Zurich and joined the UCLA Computer Science Department as postdoctoral researcher in 1995, where she developed high-performance integration platforms for heterogeneous spatial data. From 1998 to spring 2001, she was the Co-Director of the UCLA Data Mining Lab, and manager of a the NASA grant “ESP2NET”. Her research focused on high performance, location-independent tools for scientific data mining and scientific collaboration.

Her current research focuses on extending database technology to support stationary and mobile sensor networks, especially geosensor networks (PDF). Her main research focus is on decentralized in-network data collection algorithms for geosensor networks, and data stream management system technology for the support of processing, querying, analyzing and integrating vast amounts of distributed sensor data streams in real-time (up to 250K update/sec).