Biographical note

Shashi Shekhar is a McKnight Distinguished University Professor at the University of Minnesota (Computer Science faculty). For contributions to geographic information systems (GIS), spatial databases and spatial data mining, he received the IEEE-CS Technical Achievement Award and was elected an IEEE Fellow and an AAAS Fellow. He was also named a key difference-maker for the field of GIS by the most popular GIS textbook. He has a distinguished academic record that includes 280+ refereed papers, a popular textbook on Spatial Databases (Prentice Hall, 2003) and an authoritative Encyclopedia of GIS (Springer, 2008). He is serving as a member of the Computing Community Consortium Council (2012-15), a co-Editor-in-Chief of Geo-Informatica, a series editor for the Springer Briefs on GIS and as a member of the National Research Council (NRC) committee on Geo-targeted Disaster Alerts and Warning (2013). Previously, he served on multiple NRC committees including Future Workforce for Geospatial Intelligence (2011), Mapping Sciences (2004-2009) and Priorities for GEOINT Research (2004-2005). He also served as a general or program co-chair for the International Conference on Geographic Information Science (2012), the International Symposium on Spatial and Temporal Databases (2011) and ACM International Conference on Geographic Information Systems (1996). He also served on the Board of Directors of University Consortium on GIS (2003-4), as well as the editorial boards of IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering and IEEE-CS Computer Science and Engineering Practice Board. In early 1990s, his research developed core technologies behind in-vehicle navigation devices as well as web-based routing services, which revolutionized outdoor navigation in urban environments. His recent research played a critical role in evacuation route planning for homeland security and received multiple recognitions including the CTS Partnership Award for significant impact on transportation.He pioneered the research area of spatial data mining via pattern families (e.g. collocation, mixed-drove co-occurrence, cascade), keynote speeches, survey papers and workshop organization. He received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley.
Dr. Hui Xiong is an Associate Professor and Vice Chair of the Management Science and Information Systems Department, and the Director of the Rutgers Center for Information Assurance, at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, where he received a two-year early promotion/tenure (2009), the Rutgers University Board of Trustees Research Fellowship for Scholarly Excellence (2009) and the ICDM-2011 Best Research Paper Award (2011).

Dr. Xiong received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Minnesota, in 2005, a B.E. in Automation from the University of Science and Technology of China and an M.S. in Computer Science from the National University of Singapore. His general area of researchis data and knowledge engineering, with a focus on developing effective and efficient data analysis techniques for emerging data intensive applications. He has published prolifically in refereed journals and conference proceedings (3 books, 40+ journal papers and 60+ conference papers). He is a co-Editor-in-Chief of the Encyclopedia of GIS, an Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Data and Knowledge Engineering (TKDE) and the Knowledge and Information Systems (KAIS) journal. He has served on the organization and program committees of numerous conferences, including as a Program Co-Chair of the Industrial and Government Track for the 18th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining and a Program Co-Chair for the 2013 IEEE International Conference on Data Mining.