Department welcomes new faculty Reinhard Moratz and Nicholas Giudice
Dr. Reinhard Moratz and Dr. Nicholas Giudice, new faculty members in the Department of Spatial Information Science and Engineering, were welcomed by faculty, staff, and students at a recent social gathering hosted by Chair Michael Worboys. Associate Professor Moratz comes to the University of Maine from Hamburg, Germany, where he was a Senior Researcher at Plath GmbH. His research interests lie in the area of cognitive engineering for spatial applications. In his research about Human-Robot Interaction he develops a theory about how humans and robots can use simple, natural spatial expressions to achieve mutual understanding about a joint environment. Assistant Professor Giudice was a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Psychology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, prior to joining the University of Maine. His research uses real and virtual environments to investigate multimodal spatial learning, cognitive mapping, and wayfinding behavior and the optimal information requirements for developing multimodal spatial displays to support these behaviors. His experiments compare human performance within and between modalities and output displays using 3-D sound, touch, vision, and spatial language. We are excited about Reinhard and Nick’s arrival in our department and extend a warm welcome and best wishes for a productive first year at UMaine! (pictured: Reinhard Moratz, standing; Nicholas Giudice, seated)