This talk is about SpatialHadoop; a full-fledged MapReduce framework with native support for spatial data. SpatialHadoop is a comprehensive extension to Hadoop that injects spatial data awareness in each Hadoop layer, namely, the language, storage, MapReduce, and operations layers. In the language layer, SpatialHadoop adds a simple and expressive high level language for spatial data types and operations. In the storage layer, SpatialHadoop adapts traditional spatial index structures, Grid, R-tree and R+-tree, to form a two-level spatial index. SpatialHadoop enriches the MapReduce layer by new components for efficient and scalable spatial data processing. In the operations layer, SpatialHadoop is already equipped with three basic operations, range query, kNN, and spatial join as case studies. Other spatial operations can also be added following a similar approach. The talk will also discuss various active projects for big spatial data that take advantage of SpatialHadoop.

Mohamed F. Mokbel (Ph.D., Purdue University, USA, MS, B.Sc., Alexandria University, Egypt) is an associate professor at University of Minnesota as well as the founding Technical Director of the KACST GIS Technology Innovation Center, Umm Al-Qura University, Saudi Arabia. His current research interests focus on providing database and platform support for spatio-temporal data, location-based services 2.0, personalization, and recommender systems. His research work has been recognized by four best paper awards at IEEE MASS 2008, IEEE MDM 2009, SSTD 2011, and ACM MobiGIS Workshop 2012, and by the NSF CAREER award 2010. Mohamed is/was general co-chair of SSTD 2011, program co-chair of ACM SIGSPAITAL GIS 2008-2010, and MDM 2014, 2011. He has served in the editorial board of ACM Transactions on Spatial Algorithms and Systems. IEEE Data Engineering Bulletin, Distributed and Parallel Databases Journal, and Journal of Spatial Information Science. Mohamed has held various visiting positions at Microsoft Research, USA, Hong Kong Polytechnic University, and Umm Al-Qura University, Saudi Arabia. Mohamed is an ACM Senior and IEEE Senior member and a founding member of ACM SIGSPATIAL. He is currently serving as an elected chair of ACM SIGSPATIAL. For more information, please visit: www.cs.umn.edu/~mokbel