Mokbel's Group Wins 2025 IEEE ICDE 10-Year Influential Paper Award

Department of Computer Science & Engineering (CS&E) Distinguished McKnight University Professor Mohamed Mokbel’s research group earned the 2025 IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE) 10-Year Influential Paper Award. The original paper, titled “SpatialHadoop: A MapReduce Framework for Spatial Data,” was published at the 2015 IEEE ICDE conference. CS&E alumnus Ahmed Eldawy (PhD, 2016) is the primary author on the paper and received an honorable mention for the Best Dissertation Award from the University of Minnesota Graduate School. He is now an associate professor at University of California Riverside.

“Ahmed was a super student,” Mokbel said. “I was very impressed by his patience and perseverance working on this project. This is the type of work that requires coding for 2-3 years without a single publication. He was up to the task and released a great product that clearly has had a lasting impact on this community.”

Eldawy and Mokbel designed, created and launched the SpatialHadoop platform in 2013. Building off Hadoop, the state of the art system at the time, the team created a new set of code structures to help Hadoop adjust and accommodate spatial data. After two years of coding and integrating into the native platform, SpatialHadoop was released to the public and ultimately adapted by a number of companies in the industry. SpatialHadoop has also been featured in a number of text books, and has inspired papers because of the research that was made possible by the unique system.    

“In 2010, everyone was talking about Big Data; it was everywhere,” Mokbel said. “Like everyone else, we had big datasets in our lab that we wanted to analyze and work with. Unfortunately, our datasets did not work well, because we were working with spatial data. The big data systems at the time were made for general purposes, but did not translate as well to spatial data. Spatial data was starting to take off at that time and it is exploding now. We knew that spatial data would play a role in the future, and recognized the need for a system that could support this type of data.”

This is the third 10-year influential award for Mokbel’s research group. Previous awards include the 2016 VLDB 10-Year Test-of-Time Award with CS&E alumnus Chi-Yin Chow (PhD, 2010) for their work on location privacy, and the 2022 ACM SIGSPATIAL 10-Year Impact Award with CS&E alumnus Jie Bao (PhD, 2014) for their work on location-based recommendations.

“I always want to acknowledge all of my students, even if their names are not on the paper. All of the students in my group give valuable feedback on each other's projects and are contributors to the final product. Students turn ideas into excellent ones through collaboration and open discussions.”

Learn more about Mokbel’s research on his personal website.