Prof. Cecilia Aragon

Save the date for the Data Sciences Speaker Series with Prof. Cecilia Aragon, Human Centered Design & Engineering, Adjunct Professor, Computer Science & Engineering, Electrical and Computer Engineering, and Information School, University of Washington. This talk is co-sponsored by the Data Sciences Institute and the Faculty of Information, University of Toronto. 

Registration TBA

• Date: May 13, 2023 
• Time: 11:00am – 12:00pm 
• Format: In-person 

Biography 

Cecilia Aragon is Professor in the Department of Human Centered Design & Engineering, Director of the Human-Centered Data Science Lab, Founding Co-Director of the Data Science Master’s Program at the University of Washington. She is a Senior Data Science Fellow in the eScience Institute at the University of Washington. Her research focuses on human-centered data science, an emerging field at the intersection of human-computer interaction (HCI) and data science. 

Aragon has authored or co-authored over 130 peer-reviewed articles and over 140 other publications in the areas of HCI, data science, visual analytics, machine learning, and astrophysics. In 2016, she became the first Latina to be named to the rank of Full Professor in the College of Engineering at UW in its hundred-year history. She has  published 3 books: 

  Writers in the Secret Garden (with Katie Davis, MIT Press, 2019) 

  Flying Free: My Victory over Fear to Become the First Latina Pilot on the US Aerobatic Team (memoir, Blackstone Publishing, 2020). 

  Human Centered Data Science: An Introduction (with Shion Guha, Marina Kogan, Michael Muller and Gina Neff, MIT Press, 2022). 

Aragon is the co-inventor (with Raimund Seidel) of a data structure, the treap, which has been commended for its elegance and efficiency, and is now widely used in production applications ranging from wireless networking to memory allocation to fast parallel aggregate set operations. Her work on the Sunfall data visualization and workflow management system for the Nearby Supernova Factory helped advance the study of supernovae in order to reduce the statistical uncertainties on key cosmological parameters that categorize dark energy, one of the grand challenges in physics today. 

Aragon is also active in program service and supporting diversity in computing. She is a founding member of Latinas in Computing, was a board member of the Computing Research Association’s Committee on the Status of Women in Computing Research (CRA-W), a founding member of Berkeley Lab’s Computing Sciences Diversity Working Group and Women in Science Council, and chair of the IEEE Computer Society’s Entrepreneur and Pioneer Awards committee.