Themes in Temporal and Spatio-Temporal Data Management and Analytics—A Personal Retrospective

Speaker: Professor Christian S. Jensen
         Department of Computer Science
         Aalborg University
         Denmark

Title:  "Themes in Temporal and Spatio-Temporal Data Management and
         Analytics—A Personal Retrospective"


Date:   Thursday, 27 April 2023

Time:   4:00pm - 5:00pm

Venue:  Room 2303 (via lift 17/18), HKUST

Abstract:

I look back at and examine, at a high level of abstraction, my research
stream from when I started as a Ph.D. student nearly 35 years ago and up
until today. In a world focused on administrative data and desktop
computing, I started out working on temporal databases, considering
aspects such as query language design, indexing, and query processing.
Then, some 25 years ago, we saw a mobile revolution emerging. At that
time, I gradually transitioned to spatio-temporal databases, covering
again indexing and query processing, as well as a range of other topics
such as privacy. About 15 years ago, geo-social services were taking off,
and geo-tagged text content was beginning to proliferate. That prompted
work on spatio-textual indexing and query processing to support various
kinds of spatial keyword querying. More recently, we have witnessed an
increased digitalization of key societal processes, including
transportation in smart cities. Thus, I started some 10 years ago to work
on foundations for applications of vehicle trajectory data, most
prominently in relation to vehicle routing.

In the talk, I will cover some of the key topics I have worked on by means
of examples, I will explain why I worked on those topics, I will examine
the impact of the research, and I will present general observations. I
hope this will prompt the participants to reflect on their research
streams.


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Biography:

Christian S. Jensen is Professor of Computer Science at Aalborg
University, Denmark. His research concerns analytics, including machine
learning, data mining, and query processing, and data management, with a
focus on temporal and spatio-temporal data. Christian is an ACM and IEEE
Fellow, and he is a member of Academia Europaea, the Royal Danish Academy
of Sciences and Letters, and the Danish Academy of Technical Sciences. He
has received several awards, most recently the 2022 ACM SIGMOD
Contributions Award and the 2019 IEEE TCDE Impact Award. He is on the
board of Villum Fonden, a major funder of research in Denmark and is
vice-chair of the Danish National Research Foundation. He is president of
the steering committee of the Swiss National Research Program on Big Data.
In Germany, he is on the scientific advisory board (SAB) of the Max Planck
Institute for Informatics; and in Norway, he chairs the SAB of the
Norwegian Research Center for AI Innovation.