Shashi Shekhar Wins Inaugural SSTD Service Award
Department of Computer Science & Engineering Professor Shashi Shekhar earned the inaugural Service Award from the Foundation managing the biennial International Symposiums on Spatial and Temporal Data (SSTD). The award recognizes an individual with outstanding service and dedication to the success of SSTD.
Shekhar has played an integral role in the SSTD community since the beginning of the conference in 1989. He served on SSTD’s Steering Committee for a decade and chaired it for multiple years. He co- hosted the 2011 SSTD on UMN campus introducing the inaugural Blue Sky ideas track and cross-sector career panel. He has published 19 papers through SSTD and even won the Best Paper Award in 2021. Shekhar is considered a great mentor and colleague amongst his SSTD peers, as well as a perennial champion of reaching out to industry and government leaders.
“I used to go to many other computer science (CS) conferences, but in those conferences, spatial was a niche topic and it was hard to find other CS researchers looking into this topic,” Shekhar said. “This symposium gave me a family of spatial thinkers and an intellectual home. When you are in a family, you have to do your part. I think it is important to serve and give back to your chosen community.”
In addition to his work with SSTD, Shekhar is a world leader in spatial data science, which is societally important for navigation, ridesharing, and delivery apps, as well as an instrumental tool for addressing societal grand challenges such as climate change, public health, and national security. Known as the “father of modern navigation apps”, his research group is responsible for designing a novel connectivity clustered access method (CCAM), which paved the path for modern smartphone-based navigation apps and benefits billions of users around the world. He is a McKnight Distinguished University Professor and Distinguished University Teaching Professor, a fellow for IEEE and AAAS, and has served as a co-editor-in-chief of Geoinformatica journal for many years doubling its impact factor, bringing a new generation of spatial thinkers to the editorial board and continuing the tradition of special issues featuring expanded versions of best four papers from most recent SSTD.
“Unique needs of spatial data and use-cases is not something that has always been understood or accepted in the computer science field,” Shekhar said. “That’s why I tried to help whenever possible to build conferences like this and the Geoinformatica journal that bring like-minded people together. I am really honored to receive this award. Thank you to you all for being part of this community and being supportive of this work and this family.”
Learn more about the 19th International Symposium on Spatial and Temporal Data at their website.