Abstract: The need to manage and analyze spatial data is hampered by the lack of specialized systems to support such data. System builders mostly build general-purpose systems that are generic enough to handle any kind of attributes. Whenever there is a pressing need for spatial data support, it is considered as an afterthought problem that can be addressed by adding new data types, extensions, or spatial cartridges to existing systems. This talk advocates for dealing with spatial data as first class citizens, and for always thinking spatially whenever it comes to system design. This is well justified by the proliferation of location-based applications that are mainly relying on spatial data. The talk will go through various system designs and show how they would be different if designed while thinking spatially. Examples of such systems include big data systems, data cleaning systems, and machine learning-based systems.

Bio: Mohamed Mokbel is a Distinguished McKnight University Professor at the University of Minnesota. Prior roles while on leave/sabbatical from UMN include Chief Scientist of Qatar Computing Research Institute, Founding Technical Director of GIS Technology Innovation Center in Saudi Arabia, and multiple times Visiting Researcher at Microsoft Research, USA. His research interests include database systems and spatial computing. Mohamed was recognized by the VLDB 10-Year Test-of-Time Award for his work on location privacy, the IEEE ICDE 10-Year Influential Paper Award for his work on big spatial data, the ACM SIGSPATIAL 10-Year Impact Award for his work on location-based social networks, and was short listed for another ACM SIGSPATIAL 10-Year Impact Award for his work on microblogs data management. Mohamed is the Editor-in-Chief for ACM Transactions on Spatial algorithms and Systems (ACM TSAS), and is/was on the Editorial Board of ACM Books, ACM TODS, and VLDB Journal. He has served as the elected Chair of ACM SIGSPATIAL, and PC Co-Chair for ACM SIGMOD and ACM SIGSPATIAL. Mohamed is an ACM Fellow and IEEE Fellow.