Sharad Sharma

Professor of Data Science

Dr. Sharad Sharma is a Professor in the Department of Information Science at the University of North Texas (UNT). UNT is designated by the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education as a Very High Research Activity (R1) University. He is the Director of the Data Visualization and Extreme Reality (DVXR) Lab and the Director of the Data Science & Industry Innovation (DSII) Center at the UNT. He is currently also serving as the Director of B.S. in Data Science Program. Prior, he was a Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Director of Virtual Reality Laboratory at the Bowie State University (BSU). He was also the graduate program director for Department of Computer Science at BSU. He has received Ph.D in Computer Engineering from Wayne State University, Detroit, MI in 2006, M.S. from University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI in 2003, and B. Arch from Birla Institute of Technolgy, Mesra, India in 1999. Dr. Sharma won the Faculty Excellence Award for Top 5 Recipients & Most Awarded Grants and Outstanding Mentor Award at UNT in 2023. He has won the 2022 Presidential Achievement Award for Distinguished Achievement in Research & Grants at BSU. He has won the "2018 USM (University System of Maryland) Board of Regents"Faculty Award" for Excellence in Research and Scholarship. This award is given to a nominee from USM's 12 institutions, who shows evidence of exceptional scholarship and research that extends or deepens the bounds of knowledge and are recognized as innovations in the nominee's discipline. He has also won the "Outstanding Researcher Award" in year 2013, "Outstanding Faculty Award" in year 2012, "Outstanding Researcher Award" in year 2011, "Outstanding Publication Award" in year 2010, and "Outstanding Young Faculty Award" in year 2009 at College of Arts and Science in the BSU. He has also received the "Outstanding Graduate/Professional Student Leadership Award" for the year 2005-2006 at Wayne State University, Detroit, MI. He is recipient of the DHS Scientific Leadership Award.

Dr. Sharma is an expert in modeling and simulation of human behavior for emergency response and decision making with focus on multi-agent systems (MAS), multi-user virtual reality (MUVR), and mobile augmented reality applications (MARA). He is interested in merging Data Science and Virtual Reality for Advanced Visualization. He specializes in performing virtual evacuation drills for evacuations and terror events in Multi‐User Virtual Reality (MUVR) environments such as megacity, subway, airplane, bus, VR city, and university campus. He has acquired several research grants from various funding agencies such a Department of Defense (DoD), Department of Homeland Security (DHS), Army Research Laboratory (ARL), and the National Science Foundation (NSF). He has worked on a faculty research fellowship in the Human Research and Engineering Directorate (HRED) division in Army Research Laboratory (ARL) at Aberdeen Proving Ground (APG), Aberdeen, Maryland. His continued collaboration with APG involves developing new data and visualization methods for course of action planning, visualization, training, and assessment. He is also exploring socio-cultural issues for emergency response and decision making in dense urban environments such as megacity and active shooter events. He has published more than 125 peer-reviewed conference, books, and journal articles in top conferences including IEEE (VR, ICMLA, CSCI, SSCI, SoutheastCon), SPIE, and IEEE Transactions on Aerospace and Electronic Systems. [Talk1, Talk2].

As the Director of the Data Visualization and Extreme Reality (DVXR) Lab, Dr. Sharma is involved in the development and evaluation of virtual reality instructional (VRI) and augmented reality instructional (ARI) modules for teaching, learning, and training in several applications, including healthcare, education, and evacuation. His current aim is to build VR/AR training systems for complex real world situations with populations such as active shooter events, first responders, and other emergency services. The DVXR laboratory focuses on using VR, AR, MR, XR as tool for learning, training, and education. The other projects in the lab include the development of Collaborative Virtual Environment (Quality of care, Patient Safety, COVID-19 Testing, disaster response), human-centric situational awareness and big data visualization. He was also the Program Chair for the 26th International Conference on Software Engineering and Data Engineering (SEDE 2017), the Program Chair for the 27th International Conference on Software Engineering and Data Engineering (SEDE 2018), and the Program Chair for the 28th International Conference on Software Engineering and Data Engineering (SEDE 2019). He was the Conference Chair of Engineering Reality of Virtual Reality, ERVR-2024 (IS&T EI 2024), January 21-25, 2024. Dr. Sharma is also the Conference Chair of NSF CISE MSI Aspiring PI Workshop at UNT on Dec 12-13, 2024. He is the Conference Chair of Engineering Reality of Virtual Reality, ERVR-2025 (IS&T EI 2025), San Francisco, California, February 2 - 6, 2025. He is a senior member of IEEE.

Research Interests

Data Science, Data Visualization, Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality, Software Engineering, Artificial Intelligence, Human-Computer Interaction, Modeling and Simulation of Emergency Evacuation, Human Behavior Modeling, Agent-Based Modeling, Multi-Agent System, Gaming, Fuzzy Logic.