UCSB COMPUTER SCIENCE DEPARTMENT PRESENTS:
Monday, June 8, 2009
3:30-4:30
Computer Science Conference Room, Harold Frank Hall Rm. 1132
HOST: Divy Agrawal
SPEAKER: Hanan Samet
Department of Computer Science, University of Maryland
Title: Spatial Databases and Geographic Information Systems
Abstract:
An introduction is given to the spatial database issues involved in the
design of geographic information systems (GIS) from the perspective of a
computer scientist. Some of the topics to be discussed include
the nature of a GIS and the functionalities that are desired in such
systems. Representation issues will also be reviewed. The emphasis
will be on indexing methods as well as the integration of spatial and
nonspatial data. Demos will be shown of the SAND Spatial Browser
(http://www.cs.umd.edu/~brabec/sandjava) as well as the VASCO JAVA
applet (http://www.cs.umd.edu/~hjs/quadtree/index.html)
which illustrate these ideas.
Bio:
Hanan Samet received the B.S. degree in engineering from the University
of California, Los Angeles, and the M.S. Degree in operations research
and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in computer science
from Stanford University, Stanford, CA. He is a Fellow of the IEEE,
ACM, and IAPR (International Association for Pattern Recognition), and
was also elected to the ACM Council in 1989-1991 where he
served as the Capital Region Representative. He is the recpient of the
2009 UCGIS Research Award. He is currently a Science Foundation of
Ireland (SFI) Walton Fellow at the Centre for
Geocomputation at the National University of Ireland at Maynooth (NUIM).
In 1975 he joined the Computer Science Department at the University of
Maryland, College Park, where he is now a Professor. He is a member of
the Computer Vision Laboratory of the
Center for Automation Research and also has an appointment in the
University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies. At the
Computer Vision Laboratory he leads a number of research
projects on the use of hierarchical data structures for geographic
information systems. His research group has developed the QUILT system
which is a GIS basedon hierarchical spatial data structures such
as quadtrees and octrees, the SAND system which integrates spatial and
non-spatial data, the SAND Browser
(http://www.cs.umd.edu/~brabec/sandjava) which enables
browsing through a spatial database using a graphical user interface,
the VASCO spatial indexing applet (found at
http://www.cs.umd.edu/~hjs/quadtree/index.html), and a symbolic image
database system.
His research interests are data structures, computer graphics,
geographic information systems, computer vision, robotics, and database
management systems. He is the author of the recent book
titled “Foundations of Multidimensional and Metric Data Structures”
(http://www.cs.umd.edu/~hjs/multidimensional-book-flyer.pdf) published
by Morgan-Kaufmann, an imprint of Elsevier, in 2006, and of
the first two books on spatial data structures titled “Design and
Analysis of Spatial Data Structures”, and “Applications of Spatial Data
Structures: Computer Graphics, Image Processing, and GIS”, both
published by Addison-Wesley in 1990. He was the co-general chair of the
15th ACM International Conference on Advances in Geographic Information
Systems (ACMGIS’07) and the 16th ACM
SIGSPATIAL International Conference on Advances in Geographic
Information Systems (ACMGIS’08). He is the founding chair of ACM
SIGSPATIAL, and 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.
