The Computing Innovation Fellows Project

Posted on: Wednesday, June 3rd, 2009
Broad Research Area: AI / Machine Learning / Robotics / Vision, Databases / Information Retrieval / Data Mining, Graphics / Visualization, Information Assurance / Security / Privacy / Cryptography, Mobile / Ubiquitous / Embedded Computing, Social Computing / Social Informatics

Research Interests:

Cyrus Shahabi has two books and more than hundred articles, book chapters, and conference papers in the areas of databases, GIS and multimedia. Dr. Shahabi is the director of Infolab that currently has 2 post-doctorate research staff, 1 programmer staff, 9 PhD students, 2 MS students, and 3 undergraduate students with an annual research funding of $1M. Dr. Shahabi has been the single principle investigator of five NSF grants and has continuously received funding from several other agencies such as NASA, NIH, DARPA, AFRL, and DHS as well as several industries such as Google, Microsoft, NCR and Chevron.

Several real-world systems have been developed at Dr. Shahabi’s lab, InfoLab, in the past 13 years. One of his successful projects is called GeoDec, for geospatial decision making. GeoDec is an end-to-end system that allows users to navigate through a 3D model of a location (e.g., a city), and to issue customized spatiotemporal queries (such as shortest path queries, Nearest Neighbor (NN) queries, and event queries) and retrieve information while navigating about the area. In this system, large-scale sources of static and dynamic data with various modalities, including satellite imagery, road vector data, maps, point data for a specific geographic location and moving objects, 3D models, textures, and video streams are seamlessly integrated, visualized in real-time, and efficiently queried. For detailed information about the large database of spatiotemporal data maintained at InfoLab, including the entire road network of the U.S. provided by NAVTEQ, in addition to more than 15 layers of point data for the entire U.S. (e.g. Transportation Hubs, Hospitals, etc.) GeoDec and its underlying research activities have been receiving funding from NSF, Google, Microsoft, and METRANS.

Another real-world system developed at Infolab is ProDA (for Progressive Data Analysis). This system has been used by Chevron and NASA to store and access large multidimensional data streams. These datasets are similar in nature to the datasets acquired in this proposal. ProDA and its underlying research activities have been receiving funding from NSF, Microsoft, Chevron and NASA/JPL.A press release by Microsoft Research praising the ProDA system can be found at: http://infolab.usc.edu/News/PDF_FINAL_PRODA.pdf

Other areas of research include traffic data analysis, spatial databases, geospatial information integration, location privacy, spatial data outsourcing, and sensor networks.

Dr. Shahabi is the recipient of the NSF CAREER award as well as the U.S. Presidential Early Career Awards for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE).

Contact Information:

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213-740-8162