Department of Computer Science and Engineering

Guest Speaker

Button Oracles for Road Networks

Jagan Sankaranarayanan
Department of Computer Science
University of Maryland, College Park

Feb 23 2010 3:30 pm
480 Dreese Labs
All interested parties are welcome to attend.
Refreshments will be served prior to talk.

Abstract:
Popular online mapping services (e.g., Google Maps, Yahoo! Maps, and Google Local) are limited to simple shortest path operations on road networks and local searches for finding businesses (e.g., restaurants). These operations on road networks are graph-based and make no use of the spatial/locational (latitude/longitude) information associated with the vertices and/or the edges. By observing the coherence between the spatial positions of vertices and the connectivity between them, transformations of traditional graph-based operations on road networks into ones that are based purely on geometry are demonstrated. The resulting complexity improvements enable the execution of a variety of operations on large road network. The talk describes several "oracles" that reside in a relational database and which enable query processing on road networks using the SQL query language. Finally, highlights of recent work in understanding spatial references in text documents will be presented, including a spatio-textual search engine, a spatially cognizant news reader, and a news reader that automatically gathers news from Twitter messages (i.e., Tweets).

Bio:

Jagan Sankaranarayanan is an assistant research scientist at the Center for Automation Research (CfAR), University of Maryland. He received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Maryland in 2008 under the guidance of Prof. Hanan Samet. Dr. Sankaranarayanan is the recipient of a Best Paper Award at the SIGMOD 2008 conference. He also received a Best Paper Award at the ACM SIGSPATIAL GIS 2008 conference, a Best Journal Paper of 2007 Award by the Computers & Graphics Journal, and a Best Paper Nomination at the ICDE 2009 conference, where his paper was selected for publication in the IEEE Transactions on Data and Knowledge Engineering. His dissertation was nominated for the ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award by the Computer Science Department of the University of Maryland.

Host: Gagan Agrawal

* Jagan Sankaranarayanan is a CSE faculty candidate

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