Elected Officers

  • Chair, John Krumm, University of Southern California, USA
  • Vice-Chair, Li Xiong, Emory University, USA
  • Secretary, Maria Luisa Damiani, University of Milan, Italy
  • Treasurer, Ahmed Eldawy, University of California, Riverside, USA
  • Past Chair, Shawn Newsam, University of California, Merced, USA

Appointed Officers

  • Recognition Committee
    • Amr Magdy (chair), University of California, Riverside, USA
    • Siva Ravada, Oracle, Nashua, New Hampshire, USA
    • Flora Salim, University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia
  • Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) Committee
    • Yao-Yi Chiang (chair), University of Minnesota, USA
    • Jina Kim, University of Minnesota, USA
    • Heba Aly, Amazon, USA
  • Conference Rating Committee
    • Egemen Tanin (chair), University of Melbourne, Australia
    • Fusheng Wang, Stony Brook University, USA
    • Yong Li, Tsinghua University, China
    • Matthias Renz, University of Kiel, Germany
  • Newsletter Editor, Martin Werner, Technical University of Munich, Germany
  • Webmaster, Xin Zhang, University of California, Riverside, USA

Biographies

John Krumm, University of Southern California, USA

John Krumm graduated from the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University in 1993 with a Ph.D. in robotics and a thesis on texture analysis in images. He worked at the Robotics Center of Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, New Mexico for the next four years. His main projects there were computer vision for object recognition for use in robots and vehicles. He was at Microsoft Research in Redmond, Washington, USA for 25 years, starting in 1997. He is currently an associate director of the Integrated Media Systems Center in the Viterbi School of Engineering at the University of Southern California. His research focuses on understanding peoples’ location and personal data privacy. In 2017 he received a 10-year impact award for a paper on location privacy from the ACM UbiComp conference, and another from the same conference in 2021. He received the best paper award at the ACM SIGSPATIAL conference in 2022 and at the Mobile Data Management conference in the same year. His h-index on Google Scholar is 75. He is an inventor on 82 U.S. patents. Dr. Krumm was a PC chair for UbiComp 2007, ACM SIGSPATIAL 2013, and ACM SIGSPATIAL 2014. He is a past coeditor in chief of the Journal of Location Based Services and past associate editor for ACM Transactions on Spatial Algorithms and Systems. He currently serves on the editorial board of IEEE Pervasive Computing Magazine. He is the chair of the executive committee of ACM SIGSPATIAL and part of the Science Advisory Committee of the Geospatial Science and Human Security Division at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. For more details, see https://www.johnkrumm.net.

Li Xiong, Emory University, USA

Li Xiong is a Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Computer Science and Professor of Biomedical Informatics at Emory University. She held a Winship Distinguished Research Professorship from 2015-2018. She has a Ph.D. from Georgia Institute of Technology, an MS from Johns Hopkins University, and a BS from the University of Science and Technology of China. Her research lab, Assured Information Management and Sharing (AIMS), conducts research in the intersection of data management, machine learning, and data privacy and security, with a recent focus on privacy-enhancing and trustworthy machine learning and data sharing algorithms to advance data driven-AI systems for healthcare, public health, and spatial intelligence. She has published over 180 papers and received six best paper or runner up awards. She has served and serves as associate editor for IEEE TKDE, IEEE TDSC, and VLDBJ, general chair for ACM SIGSPATIAL 2024, CIKM 2022, program chair for IEEE BigData 2020 and ACM SIGSPATIAL 2020, 2018, tutorial chair for VLDB 2024, program vice-chair for VLDB 2024, ACM SIGMOD 2024, 2022, and IEEE ICDE 2023, 2020. Her research is supported by federal agencies including NSF, NIH, IARPA, AFOSR, PCORI, and industry awards including Google, IBM, Mitsubishi, Cisco, AT&T, and Woodrow Wilson Foundation. She is an IEEE fellow. For more details, please visit https://www.cs.emory.edu/~lxiong/.

Maria Luisa Damiani, University of Milan, Italy

Maria Luisa Damiani is a Full Professor at the Department of Computer Science of the University of Milan. She graduated in Computer Science from the University of Pisa cum laude and earned a Ph.D. in Computer Science from EPFL. Prior to joining the University of Milan in 2003, she worked for public and private organizations first as researcher, then as project manager in EU-funded research projects,  finally as co-founder of a start-up operating ìn the area of geospatial applications in civil engineering. Her current research focuses on mobility data processing, specifically on behavior analysis and modeling. Previously, she conducted research on location-centric security and privacy. She served as organizer of the Springl workshop series on security and privacy in GIS (2008-2011); MobiGIS  (2016-2017); Hanimob (2021-2022), all co-located with SIGSPATIAL. Moreover, she served as Demo Chair in SIGSPATIAL 2016, Workshop Chair in  MDM 2018 and SIGSPATIAL (2021-2022), advanced Seminar Chair in MDM 2021, Program Chair in MDM 2023 and General Chair in SIGSPATIAL 2023.    Currently, she serves as Associate Editor for ACM Transactions on Spatial Algorithms and Systems, Springer GeoInformatica, Transactions on Data Privacy, and (until 2022) IEEE TDSC. She has been member of the EC since 2020. For more details, please visit https://sites.google.com/view/mldamiani.

Ahmed Eldawy, University of California, Riverside, USA

Ahmed Eldawy is an Associate Professor in Computer Science at the University of California Riverside. His research interests lie in the broad area of databases with a focus on big data management and spatial data processing. Ahmed led the research and development in many open-source projects for big spatial data exploration and visualization including UCR-Star, an interactive repository for geospatial data with nearly four terabytes of publicly available data. He is a recipient of the highly prestigious NSF CAREER award as well as the best demo award in SIGSPATIAL 2020. His work is supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the US Department of Agriculture (USDA). For more details, please visit https://www.cs.ucr.edu/~eldawy/.

Shawn Newsam, University of California, Merced, USA

Shawn Newsam is a Professor in the Computer Science and Engineering Department and a Founding Faculty at the University of California, Merced. He received his B.S. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley in 1991, his M.S. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of California, Davis in 1996, and his Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 2004. From September 2003 to June 2005, he was a post-doctoral researcher with the Sapphire Scientific Data Mining group in the Center for Applied Scientific Computing at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. He joined the University of California, Merced as a Founding Faculty and the first CSE faculty hired in 2005. (So, if you are counting, he is now at his fifth UC institution!) Dr. Newsam is the recipient of a U.S. Department of Energy Early Career Scientist and Engineer Award, a U.S. National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award, and a U.S. Office of Science and Technology Policy Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE). His research interests include image processing, computer vision, and machine learning particularly as applied to spatial data. He has served SIGSPATIAL in many roles including: conference local arrangements chair (2010-2011), SIGSPATIAL conference venue coordinator (2011-2014), SIGSPATIAL vice-chair (2014-2017), conference general co-chair (2016-2017), conference program committee co-chair (2019-2020), SIGSPATIAL chair (2020-2023), and, now, SIGSPATIAL past-chair. For more details, please visit https://faculty.ucmerced.edu/snewsam/index.html.

Martin Werner, Technical University of Munich, Germany

The research area of Prof. Werner (*1984) includes methodological research around topics of acquisition, organization, compression, analysis, and visualization of georeferenced or geometric data in large scales. He puts emphasis on methods of distributed computing, machine learning, image and text analysis, randomized data structures, high performance computing, and quantum algorithms. Prof. Werner studied mathematics at University Bonn, and did a doctorate at the intersection of geometry and applications related to indoor navigation at LMU Munich. In his time as a postdoctoral researcher, junior professor, and senior researcher he completed his view on the processing of spatial data to a comprehensive perspective with stations at LMU Munich, Leibniz-University Hannover, German Aerospace Center (DLR), and UniBW Munich. In April 2020 he joined the faculty of aerospace and geodesy with a professorship for Big Geospatial Data Management. For more information, please visit https://www.professoren.tum.de/en/werner-martin.

Xin Zhang, University of California, Riverside, USA

Xin Zhang is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of California, Riverside. She received her B.S. in Software Engineering from Shandong University in 2016 and her M.S. in Computer Science from Washington State University in 2018. She interned at IBM Research, Almaden, in the summer of 2021. Her research interests include big data management and approximate query processing. She started to serve as the SIGSPATIAL webmaster in 2023. For more information, please visit https://sites.google.com/ucr.edu/xzhan261.