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Organization

• General Co-Chairs
• Varun Chandola (SUNY Buffalo)
• Ranga Raju Vatsavai (NCSU)

Landscape Dynamics, Geographic Big Data and Scalable Computing: The Oak Ridge Experience

Speaker: Dr. Budhendra Bhaduri, Oak Ridge National Laboratory

Abstract: Much of our scientific and technological focus has been to ensure a sustainable future with healthy people living on a healthy planet where energy, environment, and mobility interests are simultaneously optimized. Ability to observe and measure through instrumentation of our environment and infrastructures from buildings to planet scale, coupled with explosion of data from citizen sensors brings much promise for capturing the social/behavioral dimension and provides a unique opportunity to manage and increase efficiencies of existing built environments as well as design a more sustainable future. Analysis of disparate and dynamic geographic data provides an effective component of an information extraction framework for multi-level reasoning, query, and extraction of geospatial-temporal features. With increasing temporal resolution of geographic data, there is a compelling motivation to couple the powerful modeling and analytical capability of a GIS to perform spatial-temporal analysis and visualization on dynamic data streams. However, the challenge in processing large volumes of high resolution earth observation and simulation data by traditional GIS has been compounded by the drive towards real-time applications and decision support. Drawing from our experience at Oak Ridge National Laboratory providing scientific and programmatic support for federal agencies, this presentation will highlight progress and challenges of some of the emerging data analysis and computational approaches, including high performance computing, illustrated with population and urban dynamics, sustainable energy and mobility, and urban resiliency.

Speaker Bio: Dr. Budhendra (Budhu) Bhaduri is a Corporate Research Fellow and leads the Geographic Information Science and Technology (GIST) group at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. He is the founding director of the Oak Ridge Urban Dynamics Institute and holds professorial appointments with the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. His research interests and experience include novel implementation of geospatial science and technology in sustainable development research, including urbanization and population dynamics, energy resource assessment, and disaster management. He is a founding member of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Geospatial Sciences Steering Committee and a recipient of the Department’s Outstanding Mentor Award for his dedicated service for developing future workforce for the nation. Dr. Bhaduri received his Ph.D. from Purdue University. He has a MS from Kent State University, and a M.Sc. and a B.Sc. from University of Calcutta, India.

Geotagging Social Media for Enhanced Location-based Search

Speaker: Prof. Yan Huang, University of North Texas

Abstract: The number of worldwide social network users is expected to reach 2.5 billion by 2018 (1/3 of Earth’s population). A tremendous amount of information is being shared everyday on social media sites. This massive popularity has lends itself to event detection (social gatherings, natural disaster occurrences, and insurgent activities). Spatiotemporal analytics from social media can assist assimilating social media information of interest in targeted geographic regions and to staying informed about emerging issues. We present our work in the area of generating spatiotemporal analytics in terms of geotagging, location recognition, spatiotemporal correlation detection, and event detection from big social media data and outline challenges and opportunities.

Speaker Bio: Yan Huang received her B.S. degree in Computer Science from Peking University, Beijing, China, 1997 and Ph.D. degree in, Computer Science from University of Minnesota, USA, 2003. She is currently a professor of the department of the Computer Science and Engineering at the University of North Texas, Denton, TX, USA. Her research interests include spatio-temporal databases and mining, urban computing, geo-stream data processing, and location-based social networks. She has been a visiting scholar of Microsoft Research Asia May – August 2011. During Fall 2011, she visited Fudan University, China. Currently, she is on the Board of Directors of The SSTD Endowment (2014-2019), is on the organization committee of GeoComputation 2015, is the General Chair of ACM SIGSPATIAL 2014 and 2015, and was on the Executive Board of ACM SIGSPATIAL (2010-2014). She received Distinguished Service Award from ACM SIGSPATIAL in 2010. Her research has been/is supported by Texas Advanced Research Program (ARP), Oak Ridge National Lab, National Science Foundation, Texas Department of Transportation, and U.S. Department of Defense.

Compressing Spatial Data (and the Challenges of “Big” Aspect)

Speaker: Prof. Goce Trajcevski, Iowa State University

Abstract: This talk will give an overview of issues and solutions in the topic(s) of compressing spatial, temporal and spatio-temporal data, and will identify a few contemporary challenges. After a brief introduction and motivation, the first focused part will address the fundamental techniques for data compression and their impact on the error in the answers to different queries. The next major portion of the talk will focus on compression-related aspects in different contexts and classes of applications -- e.g., tracking in sensor networks, symbolic trajectories, and analytics related (i.e., warehousing). The last part of the talk will have as a primary objective an identification of the aspects of data compression which (in the opinion of the presenter) are challenges of relevance to Big Spatial data sets. More specifically, an attempt will be made to identify the unique twists that compression has when applied to certain problems of both technical as well as societal relevance broadly.

Speaker Bio: Goce Trajcevski received his B.Sc. degree from the University of Sts. Kiril i Metodij, and his MS and PhD degrees from the University of Illinois at Chicago. Presently, he is an Associate Professor at the Dept. of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Iowa State University. His main research interests are in the areas of Spatio-Temporal Data Management, Uncertainty and Reactive Behavior Management – in both Moving Object Databases and Wireless Sensor Networks settings. In addition to a book chapter and three encyclopedia chapters, he has co-authored over 120 publications in refereed conferences and journals, and has received two best paper awards (CoopIS 2000 and MDM 2010), best short-paper award (MSWiM 2013) and best demo award (SSTD 2017). His research has been funded by BEA, Northrop Grumman Corp., the NSF and the ONR. He has served in the organizing and program committees in numerous conferences and workshops, and was a General Co-Chair of ICDE 2014 as well as a PC Co-Chair of ADBIS 2014 and ACM SIGSPATIAL GIS 2016 and 2017.