Xiaogang (Marshall) Ma Candidate Statement

Candidate for the Chair of SemTech - Committee for Semantic Technologies

Short Bio:

Xiaogang (Marshall) Ma is an associate professor of computer science at the University of Idaho. He received his Ph.D. degree of Earth Systems Science and GIScience from University of Twente, Netherlands in 2011, and then completed postdoctoral training of Data Science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. His research focuses on deploying data science in the Semantic Web to support cross-disciplinary collaboration and scientific discovery, with broad interests in complex systems in Earth and environmental sciences, data interoperability and provenance, and visualized exploratory analysis of Big and Small Data. More information is available on his website: https://webpages.uidaho.edu/max/.

Statement of Interests:

Marshall is affiliated with the ESIP partner Northwest Knowledge Network (now part of the Institute for Interdisciplinary Data Science) at University Idaho. Since 2012, he has been active in ESIP and other geoinformatics communities. He had served as Geological Society of America – Geoinformatics Division Chair in 2019 and is currently the Award Committee Chair for the International Association for Mathematical Geosciences. He is also active in several other communities, including AGU, EarthCube, CODATA, and RDA. Marshall attends ESIP meetings regularly and has received several Funding Friday and Incubator awards as PI, co-PI, or advisor. In recent years he has helped introduce ESIP to many students and early-career scientists. In his understanding, ESIP is a ‘down-to-earth’ community where participants focus on methods and technologies that work in the real world. He personally benefits from the kind and generous open science activities from ESIP, and would like to lead the continuous thriving of the community. He is a candidate for the SemTech Chair (2023-2024).