Spatial Gems

This book presents fundamental new techniques for understanding and processing geospatial data. These “spatial gems” articulate and highlight insightful ideas that often remain unstated in graduate textbooks, and which are not the focus of research papers. They teach us how to do something useful with spatial data, in the form of algorithms, code, or equations. Unlike a research paper, Spatial Gems, Volume 1 does not focus on “Look what we have done!” but rather shows “Look what YOU can do!” With contributions from researchers at the forefront of the field, this volume occupies a unique position in the literature by serving graduate students, professional researchers, professors, and computer developers in the field alike.

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, NM, 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, WA, 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. 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 is an inventor on 75 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. He currently serves as an associate editor for ACM Transactions on Spatial Algorithms and Systems and on the editorial board of IEEE Pervasive Computing Magazine. He is on the executive committee of ACMSIGSPATIAL and part of the Science Advisory Committee of the Geospatial Science and Human Security Division at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

Andreas Züfle is an associate professor at George Mason University, USA. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, Germany (LMU), in 2013. Dr. Züfle's research focuses on data management. He is mainly known for his contribution to the field of geospatial data management and mining. In this area, he has made contributions in several subareas, notably uncertain data management, spatial indexing, clustering, and geosimulation. His interdisciplinary work has applications in geosciences, transportation, epidemiology, and social science.

Cyrus Shahabi is a professor of Computer Science, Electrical & 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 cofounder of two USC spin-offs, Geosemble Technologies and Tallygo, which were both acquired, in July 2012 and March 2019, respectively. He received his B.S. in Computer Engineering from Sharif University of Technology and his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from the University of Southern California. He has authored two books and more than three hundred research papers on databases, GIS, and multimedia with more than 14 US patents. He was an associate editor of IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems, IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, and VLDB Journal. He is currently on the editorial board of the ACM Transactions on Spatial Algorithms and Systems and ACM Computers in Entertainment. Dr. Shahabi is a recipient of the ACM Distinguished Scientist award, US Presidential Early Career Awards for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), and the NSF CAREER award. He is a fellow of the National Academy of Inventors (NAI) and IEEE.