  Discovering research expertise at institutions can be a difficult task.
Manually curated university directories easily become out of date and they
often lack the information necessary for understanding a researcher's interests
and past work, making it harder to explore the diversity of research at an
institution and identify research talents. This results in lost opportunities
for both internal and external entities to discover new connections and nurture
research collaboration. To solve this problem, we have developed PeopleMap, the
first interactive, open-source, web-based tool that visually "maps out"
researchers based on their research interests and publications by leveraging
embeddings generated by natural language processing (NLP) techniques. PeopleMap
provides a new engaging way for institutions to summarize their research
talents and for people to discover new connections. The platform is developed
with ease-of-use and sustainability in mind. Using only researchers' Google
Scholar profiles as input, PeopleMap can be readily adopted by any institution
using its publicly-accessible repository and detailed documentation.
