SPATIAL DATABASES AND GEOGRAPHIC INFORMATION SYSTEMS

Speaker:	Professor Hanan Samet
		Department of Computer Science
		University of Maryland

Title:		"SPATIAL DATABASES AND GEOGRAPHIC INFORMATION SYSTEMS"


Date:		Monday, 19 October, 2009

Time:		4:00pm - 5:00pm

Venue:		Lecture Theatre F
		(Leung Yat Sing Lecture Theatre,near lifts 25/26), HKUST

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.

This seminar is co-supported by CSE of HKUST and ACM (Hong Kong Chapter)


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Biography:

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 recipient 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 based on 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.