Abstract

Since Fall 2010, as part of a contract with Los Angeles Metropolitan Transportation Authority (LA-Metro), we have been given access to high-resolution spatiotemporal transportation data from the LA County road network. This includes data from about 10,000 traffic sensors located on the LA highways and arterial streets, streaming in real-time at the rate of 1 reading/sensor/min.

In this talk, I will first present an end-to-end system that we developed for LA-Metro, dubbed TransDec (short for Transportation Decision-Making), to enable real-time integration, visualization, querying, and analysis of these dynamic transportation datasets. Subsequently, I focus on a route-planning problem where the weights on the road-network edges vary as a function of time due to the variability of traffic congestion.  I will show that naïve approaches to address this problem are either inaccurate or slow, leading to our approach to this problem: A time-dependent A* algorithm.

I will then discuss another area of my research, spatial-crowdsourcing, where spatiotemporal tasks should be matched to workers at scale and in real-time.  I will conclude by showing that if the workers in spatial-crowdsourcing are drivers and the tasks riders, then spatial crowdsourcing and route-planning come together as an enabler for many large-scale real-time vehicle routing applications such as Uber’s real-time ride-matching.

Bio

Cyrus Shahabi is a Professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering and the Director of the Information Laboratory (InfoLAB) at the Computer Science Department and also the Director of the NSF's Integrated Media Systems Center (IMSC) at the University of Southern California (USC). He is also the director of Informatics at USC’s Viterbi School of Engineering.  He was the CTO and co-founder of a USC spin-off, Geosemble Technologies, which was acquired in July 2012. Since then, he founded another company, ClearPath (recently rebranded as TallyGo), focusing on predictive path-planning for car navigation systems. He received his B.S. in Computer Engineering from Sharif University of Technology in 1989 and then his M.S. and Ph.D. Degrees in Computer Science from the University of Southern California in May 1993 and August 1996, respectively. He authored two books and more than two hundred research papers in the areas of databases, GIS and multimedia with more than 12 US Patents.

Dr. Shahabi has received funding from several agencies such as NSF, NIJ, NASA, NIH, DARPA, AFRL, and DHS as well as several industries such as Chevron, Google, HP, Intel, Microsoft, NCR, NGC and Oracle. He was an Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems (TPDS) from 2004 to 2009, IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering (TKDE) from 2010-2013 and VLDB Journal from 2009-2015. He is currently on the editorial board of the ACM Transactions on Spatial Algorithms and Systems (TSAS) and ACM Computers in Entertainment. He is the founding chair of IEEE NetDB workshop and also the general co-chair of SSTD’15, ACM GIS 2007, 2008 and 2009. He chaired the nomination committee of ACM SIGSPATIAL for the 2011-2014 terms. He is a PC co-Chair of BigComp’2016 and MDM’2016. In the past, he has been PC co-chair of DASFAA 2015, IEEE MDM 2013 and IEEE BigData 2013, and regularly serves on the program committee of major conferences such as VLDB, ACM SIGMOD, IEEE ICDE, ACM SIGKDD, IEEE ICDM, and ACM Multimedia.

Dr. Shahabi is a fellow of IEEE, and a recipient of the ACM Distinguished Scientist award in 2009, the 2003 U.S. Presidential Early Career Awards for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), the NSF CAREER award in 2002, and the 2001 Okawa Foundation Research Grant for Information and Telecommunications. He was also a recipient of the US Vietnam Education Foundation (VEF) faculty fellowship award in 2011 and 2012, an organizer of the 2011 National Academy of Engineering “Japan-America Frontiers of Engineering” program, an invited speaker in the 2010 National Research Council (of the National Academies) Committee on New Research Directions for the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, and a participant in the 2005 National Academy of Engineering “Frontiers of Engineering” program.