Path and Distance Oracles in Spatial Networks

Date and Time of the talk: March 25 2021, 9:30 AM EDT

Information of the Speaker

Jagan Sankaranarayanan, Google LLC

Jagan Sankaranarayanan is a technical lead in the data infrastructure group at Google. Prior to that, he was the Department Head of Data Management at NEC Labs America. Jagan got a doctoral degree in Computer Science from the University of Maryland with Prof. Hanan Samet. His Ph.D. thesis was nominated for both the ACM Doctoral and Jim Gray dissertation awards by The University of Maryland. Jagan is a recipient of several awards: Test of time award from ACM SIGSPATIAL in 2018, Best Paper Awards from ACM SIGMOD and ACM SIGSPATIAL GIS in 2008 as well as the Best Journal Paper of 2007 Award, ICDE 2009 runner-up, and the Top Cited Award 2005-2010 from Computers and Graphics Journal. He also received the NEC Invention of the year (2014), University of Maryland Best Invention of 2009 and a citizenship award at Google. He has published more than 60 papers and serves in the editorial board of the Distributed and Parallel Databases Journal. Recently, he was a program chair of ACM SIGSPATIAL and publicity chair of ACM SIGMOD.

Abstract

Spatial networks (e.g., road networks) are general graphs with spatial information (e.g., latitude/longitude) information associated with the vertices and/or the edges of the graph. Techniques are presented for query processing on spatial networks that are based on the observed coherence between the spatial positions of the vertices and the shortest paths between them. This facilitates aggregation of the vertices into coherent regions that share vertices on the shortest paths between them. Using these frameworks, scalable oracles are conceptualized that can perform a wide variety of operations such as nearest neighbor finding and distance joins on large datasets of locations residing on a spatial network. These frameworks essentially decouple the process of computing shortest paths from that of spatial query processing as well as also decouple the domain of the participating objects from the domain of the vertices of the spatial network. This means that as long as the spatial network is unchanged, the algorithm and underlying representation of the shortest paths in the spatial network can be used with different sets of objects.