Elected Officers

  • Chair, Shawn Newsam, University of California, Merced, USA
  • Past Chair, Cyrus Shahabi, University of Southern California, USA
  • Vice-Chair, Egemen Tanin, University of Melbourne, Australia
  • Secretary, John Krumm, Microsoft Research, USA
  • Treasurer, Maria Luisa Damiani, University of Milan, Italy

Appointed Officers

  • Newsletter Editor, Martin Werner, Technical University of Munich, Germany
  • Webmaster, Xueqing Deng, University of California, Merced, USA

Biographies

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 is also the chair of the graduate program in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. 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 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), and, now, SIGSPATIAL chair. For more details, see https://faculty.ucmerced.edu/snewsam/.

Cyrus Shahabi, University of Southern California, USA

Cyrus Shahabi is a Professor of Computer Science, Electrical and Computer Engineering and Spatial Sciences; Helen N. and Emmett H. Jones Professor of Engineering; the chair of the Computer Science Department; and the director of the Integrated Media Systems Center (IMSC) at USC’s Viterbi School of Engineering. He was co-founder of two USC spin-offs, Geosemble Technologies and Tallygo, which both were acquired, in July 2012 and March 2019, respectively. He received his B.S. in Computer Engineering from Sharif University of Technology in 1989 and then his M.S. and Ph.D. Degrees in Computer Science from the University of Southern California in May 1993 and August 1996, respectively. He authored two books and more than three hundred research papers in the areas of databases, GIS and multimedia with more than 14 US Patents. Dr. Shahabi was an Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems (TPDS) from 2004 to 2009, IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering (TKDE) from 2010-2013 and VLDB Journal from 2009-2015. He is currently on the editorial board of the ACM Transactions on Spatial Algorithms and Systems (TSAS) and ACM Computers in Entertainment. He chaired the nomination committee of ACM SIGSPATIAL for the 2011-2014 terms. Dr. Shahabi is a fellow of IEEE, and a recipient of the 2003 U.S. Presidential Early Career Awards for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE). For more details, please visit: https://infolab.usc.edu/Shahabi/.

Egemen Tanin, University of Melbourne, Australia

Dr. Egemen Tanin is a Professor at the School of Computing and Information Systems, University of Melbourne. Dr. Tanin’s research areas are Spatial Databases and GIS. He focuses on mobile systems and new sensing technologies and the impact of these systems and technologies on Spatial Databases. He has served as a PC Chair for ACM SIGSPATIAL GIS in 2011 and in 2012 and is currently an Associate Editor of ACM Transactions on Spatial Algorithms and Systems. Dr. Tanin is also the co-founder of ACM SIGSPATIAL Australia. He is the founding editor of ACM SIGSPATIAL Special, the newsletter for SIGSPATIAL. Prof. Tanin has taken many different roles for various venues during his career including conferences and journals such as the SIGMOD Conference, PVLDB and ACM Transactions on Database Systems as well as IEEE ICDE. He has obtained his Ph.D. degree in 2001 from the Department of Computer Science at the University of Maryland, College Park. For more details regarding Prof. Tanin please visit http://people.eng.unimelb.edu.au/etanin/.

John Krumm, Microsoft Research, USA

John Krumm graduated from Carnegie Mellon University in 1993 with a PhD 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 has been at Microsoft Research in Redmond, Washington, USA since 1997, and is currently a senior principal researcher. His research focuses on understanding peoples’ location and how to use that information to benefit the user. He holds 56 U.S. patents. Dr. Krumm was a PC chair for UbiComp 2007, ACM SIGSPATIAL 2013, and ACM SIGSPATIAL 2014, and a coeditor in chief for the Journal of Location Based Services. He currently serves on the editorial board of the IEEE Pervasive Computing Magazine, as an associate editor for ACM Transactions on Spatial Algorithms and Systems, and on the executive committee of ACM SIGSPATIAL.

Maria Luisa Damiani, University of Milan, Italy

Maria Luisa Damiani (Ph.D. Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, EPFL, Switzerland) is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science of the University of Milan. Prior to joining the University of Milan, she worked for several years in public and private organizations, first as researcher, next as project manager in EU-funded research projects, and finally as co-founder of a start-up operating ìn the area of geospatial applications. Her research activity focuses on mobility data modeling, location-centric security, and mobility data analytics. She co-organized the Springl workshop series on Security and Privacy in GIS, from 2008 to 2011 and the MobiGIS workshop in 2016-2017, both co-located with ACM SIGSPATIAL. She served as demo co-chair in ACM SIGSPATIAL 2016 and Workshop Chair in IEEE MDM 2018. She is an Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing, Transactions on Data Privacy and GeoInformatica. For more information please visit: http://mdamiani.di.unimi.it/

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, 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.

Xueqing Deng, University of California, Merced, USA

Xueqing Deng is a PhD student in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of California, Merced. She received her B.S. in Remote Sensing and Geographic Information System from Sun Yat-Sen University, China (2016). Her research interests include computer vision and deep learning particularly as applied to spatial data. She is an IEEE student member. She is a recipient of ACM SIGSPATIAL NSF Student Travel Award (2017, 2018). Xueqing started to serve as the SIGSPATIAL webmaster in 2020. For more information, please visit: https://sites.google.com/view/xueqingdeng7/.