Elected Officers

• Chair, Walid G. Aref, Purdue University
• Past Chair, Hanan Samet, University of Maryland
• Vice-Chair, Chang-Tien Lu, Virginia Tech
• Secretary, Divyakant Agrawal, University of California at Santa Barbara
• Treasurer, Mohamed Mokbel, University of Minnesota

Appointed Officers

• Newsletter Editor, Andrew Danner, Swarthmore College
• Conference Finances Coordinator, Yan Huang, University of North Texas
• Conference Venue Coordinator, Shawn Newsam, University of California at Merced
• Webmaster, Marco Adelfio, University of Maryland

Biographies of Officers

Walid G. Aref, Purdue University, USA

Dr. Walid G. Aref is a Professor of computer science at Purdue. His research interests are in developing database technologies for emerging applications, e.g., spatial, spatio-temporal, multimedia, bioinformatics, and sensor databases. He is also interested in indexing, data mining, and geographic information systems (GIS). In 2001, he received the CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation and in 2004, he received a Purdue University Faculty Scholar award. Professor Aref is a member of Purdue's Discovery Park Bindley Bioscience and Cyber Centers. He is on the editorial board of the VLDB Journal and is a senior member of the IEEE. He served as the Program Committee Co-Chair of the ACMGIS Symposium on Geographic Information Systems in 2001. For more details, see http://www.cs.purdue.edu/~aref.

Hanan Samet, University of Maryland, USA

Dr. Hanan Samet is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Maryland where he leads a number of research projects on the use of hierarchical data structures for database applications involving multimedia data such as spatial and image databases. His research group has developed the SAND spatial browser, the VASCO system of JAVA applets for visualizing and animating spatial indexes (http://www.cs.umd.edu/~hjs/quadtree/index.html), and the MARCO system for map retrieval by content which enables pictorial queries on a symbolic image database system. He is the author of the recent book "Foundations of Multidimensional and Metric Data Structures" published by Morgan-Kaufmann, San Francisco, CA, 2006 (http://www.mkp.com/multidimensional), which received an Honorable Mention Award (one of two with one first place winner) in the 2006 best book in Computer and Information Science competition from the Professional and Scholarly Publishers (PSP) Group of the American Publishers Association (AAP). He is also the author of "Design and Analysis of Spatial Data Structures" and "Applications of Spatial Data Structures: Computer Graphics, Image Processing and GIS" published by Addison-Wesley, Reading, MA, 1990, which are the first two books on spatial data structures. He has a Ph.D from Stanford University. He is a Fellow of the ACM, IEEE, and the International Association of Patter Recognition (IAPR). In 1989-1991 he served as the Capital region representative on the ACM Council.  He is the recipient of the 2009 UCGIS Research Award.  received best paper awards in the 2008 SIGMOD Conference, the 2008 SIGSPATIAL ACMGIS'08 Conference, and the 2007 Computers & Graphics Journal.  His paper at the 2009 IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE) was selected as one of the best papers for publication in the IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering. For more details, see http://www.cs.umd.edu/~hjs.

Dr. Chang-Tien Lu is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. He received an M.S. degree from the Georgia Institute of Technology, and a Ph.D. degree from the University of Minnesota. He served as Program Co-Chair for the 2006 IEEE International Conference on Tools with Artificial Intelligence and the 2007 IEEE International Workshop on Spatial and Spatial-temporal Data Mining. Dr. Lu's research work focuses on emerging requirements for storing, analyzing, exchanging, visualizing, and disseminating spatial (and spatio-temporal) data in geospatial applications. His research group has developed several web-based spatial analysis and visualization systems for managing and mining various kinds of spatial information. Specific projects include discovering spatial anomalies, identifying recurrent or unexpected events, and predicting future trends. His research projects have been sponsored by the Department of Defense, the Virginia Department of Transportation, and the Virginia Transportation Research Council. For more details, see http://www.cs.vt.edu/~ctlu/.

Mohamed Mokbel is an associate professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Minnesota. His current main research interests focus on providing database and platform support for spatial data, moving objects, and location-based services. His research work has been recognized by three best paper awards at IEEE MASS 2008, MDM 2009, and SSTD 2011, and by the NSF CAREER award 2010. Mohamed was the general co-chair of SSTD 2011 and program co-chair for MDM 2011, DMSN 2011, and LBSN 2011. Mohamed was also the proceeding chair of ACM SIGMOD 2010, and the program co-chair for ACM SIGSPATIAL GIS 2008, 2009, and 2010. He serves in the editorial board of IEEE Data Engineering Bulletin, Distributed and Parallel Databases Journal, and Journal of Spatial Information Science. Mohamed is an ACM and IEEE member and a founding member of ACM SIGSPATIAL. For more information, please visit: www.cs.umn.edu/~mokbel.

Dr. Andrew Danner is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Swarthmore College. His research interests include I/O-efficient algorithms, computational geometry, and GIS--particularly terrain modeling. He received his Ph.D. and M.S. from Duke University on I/O Efficient Algorithms and Applications in GIS. For more details, see http://www.cs.swarthmore.edu/~adanner/.

Yan Huang is an associate professor at the Computer Science and Engineering department of University of North Texas. She received her B.S. degree in Computer Science from Beijing University, Beijing, China, in 1997 and Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from University of Minnesota in 2003. Her research interests include spatio-temporal databases and mining, geo-stream data management, location-based services and networks. She is a recipient of a Ralph E. Powe Junior Faculty Enhancement Awards from ORNL Oak Ridge Associated Universities. Her research has been supported by supported by Texas Advanced Research Program (ARP), Oak Ridge National Lab, NSF, and Texas Department of Transportation. She served as the treasurer for ACM SIGSpatial GIS 2007-2011. For more details, see http://www.cse.unt.edu/~huangyan.