Amr Magdy

Assistant Professor
Department of Computer Science and Engineering                Office: 328 Winston Chung Hall
Co-founder at the Center for Geospatial Sciences                     Telephone: (951) 827-9223
University of California, Riverside                                                        E-mail: amr@cs.ucr.edu

Amr Magdy is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Engineering and a co-founding faculty member of the Center for Geospatial Sciences at UC Riverside. His research interests include big data management, spatial data management, large-scale data analytics, indexing, and main-memory management. His research has been published in prestigious research venues, including ACM SIGSPATIAL, VLDB, VLDB Journal, ACM SIGMOD, ACM TSAS, IEEE ICDE, and IEEE TKDE. Amr's research is recognized as the best paper runner-ups in ACM SIGSPATIAL 2023 and IEEE MDM 2023, selected among the best papers in SSTD 2023, ACM SIGSPATIAL 2019, and IEEE ICDE 2014, and has been incubated by several industrial collaborators. Amr has received several research awards, including the Google-CAHSI, Microsoft, and NSF CAREER awards in 2023.

CV           Research Highlights           Academic Profile

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Research Highlights

Overview: Amr's recent research focuses on scalability and expressiveness for spatial data science. He particularly emphasizes enabling social scientists to analyze large-scale spatial data using advanced spatial statistical analysis techniques. Traditional computational systems for spatial data have primarily addressed basic queries like spatial kNN, spatial range, and spatial join queries, including variations such as kNN-join queries. However, these queries fall short of addressing the comprehensive needs of spatial statistical analysis. Statistical methods are extensively utilized by social scientists, including geographers, environmental scientists, and ecologists. Consequently, over the past two decades, there has been a parallel development of computing tools, resulting in Python and R libraries like PySAL, GeoDa, GeoPy, and GeoPandas, catering to this broad user base. These users are well-positioned to conduct meaningful analyses on the plethora of available datasets. Notably, ~14 million datasets indexed by Google Dataset Search, predominantly originating from geosciences and social sciences, constitute 45.2% of all datasets, accessed by a third of all users and primarily dominated by spatial data. However, current tools encounter scalability issues with substantial spatial data, such as the vast amounts of social media data rich in insights for social scientists. Amr’s work seeks to fill this void by empowering social scientists with scalable computing systems for spatial statistical analysis on large datasets. Additionally, it enhances the expressiveness of queries, enabling previously unfeasible queries due to scalability constraints.

Amr's recent work spans various aspects of scalable and expressive spatial data science. He has significantly enhanced the scalability and expressiveness of spatial grouping queries, which are foundational for spatial statistical analyses. His improvements cover the grouping of spatial points, lines, and polygons across diverse settings and applications. Notably, he has developed advanced spatial regionalization queries, essentially sophisticated polygon grouping queries, that surpass existing methods with up to a 200x increase in runtime speed and the capacity to handle datasets up to 10 times larger. Additionally, he has facilitated the generation of random distributions, empowering the statistical assessment of spatial regionalization solution quality. Side by side, Amr's work integrates machine learning to augment both the scalability and accuracy of spatial queries. This integration encompasses a variety of learning techniques to refine spatio-textual selectivity estimation in dynamic streaming data, identify spatial hotspots along networks with statistical rigor, and enhance the efficiency of spatial joins in distributed settings.

Interdisciplinary collaborations: Interdisciplinary projects, developed in partnership with social scientists, are at the heart of Amr's research, and pivotal to the mission of the UCR Center for Geospatial Sciences, which thrives as an interdisciplinary cluster of faculty members. His interdisciplinary projects include collaborators from University of California, Riverside (UCR), as well as the American Association of Geographers, Texas State University, San Diego State University, San Diego Mesa College, the California Geographic Alliance, and Sweetwater Union High School District.

Notable achievements: Amr's research is published and recognized in top research venues for big data management and spatial data analysis, including ACM SIGSPATIAL, IEEE ICDE, VLDB, SSTD, IEEE MDM, VLDB Journal, ACM TSAS, IEEE TKDE, Springer GeoInformatica, in addition to interdisciplinary venues. His papers are shortlisted for best paper awards at five major conferences for spatial and spatio-temporal data analysis, IEEE ICDE'14, twice at ACM SIGSPATIAL'19 and '23, IEEE MDM'23 and SSTD'23. He is also awarded the best paper at the 6th International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies for Disaster Management (ICT-DM'19). His research is being supported by eight research funding grants from the USA National Science Foundation (NSF), Google, and Microsoft, four as a Principal Investigator (PI), two as a co-PI and two as a collaborator. This includes the NSF CAREER Award 2023, a distinction that ranks among the most prestigious recognitions for assistant professors from NSF. So far, we raised total of 4.67M USD along with collaborators, including 1.24M USD dedicated to supporting his research group.

News

    Elevated to IEEE Senior Member grade.
    Our paper have been shortlisted for ACM SIGSPATIAL 2024 10-Year Impact Award (equivalent to Test-of-time Award).
    Received the ACM SIGMOD Distinguished PC Member Award 2024.
    Received the Microsoft MSI research award 2023 to support edge-based geospatial data analysis.
    Our paper have been selected among the best papers of ACM SIGSPATIAL 2023.
    Our paper have been selected among top-5 best papers of SSTD 2023.
    Our paper have been selected as the best paper runner-up in IEEE MDM 2023.
    Received the Google-CAHSI research award 2023 to support regionalization queries at a system level.
    Received the NSF CAREER award 2023 to support scalable spatial data science.
    Serving as a vice PC chair (senior PC member) for ACM SIGSPATIAL 2023.
    Serving as a PC member for ACM SIGMOD 2023, ICDE 2023, VLDB 2024.
    Serving as a reviewer for ACM TODS, ACM TSAS, IEEE TKDE, and VLDB Journal.
    Serving as a co-organizer in different roles for ACM SIGSPATIAL 2023, ICDE 2023, MDM 2023, and SSTD 2023.
    Our papers have been accepted in ACM SIGSPATIAL 2022.
    Our paper on p-regions spatial regionalization has been accepted in VLDB 2022.
    Our paper on expressive max-p spatial regionalization has been accepted in IEEE ICDE 2022.
    Our paper on social spatio-keyword search on streams has been accepted in ACM TSAS.
    Our papers have been accepted in ACM SIGSPATIAL 2021.
    Our paper on learning-based estimation on spatio-textual streams has been accepted in IEEE ICDE 2021.
    Our paper on spatial group-by queries has been accepted in ACM SIGSPATIAL 2020.
    Our demo paper on spatial queries on user-generated has been accepted in IEEE ICDE 2020.
    Our survey paper on microblogs data management has been accepted in VLDB Journal.
    Received the NSF CRII award 2019 to support scalable queries on user-generated data.
    Our papers have been accepted in ACM SIGSPATIAL 2019, and one of them has been selected among the best papers.
    Received NSF RIDIR award to support scalable spatial analysis for social sciences.
    Our paper on sptial-keyword search on streaming data has been accepted in ACM SIGSPATIAL 2018.

Honors and Awards

    Shortlist of ACM SIGSPATIAL 2024 10-Year Impact Award (equivalent to Test-of-time Award).
    ACM SIGMOD Distinguished PC Member Award 2024.
    Best research paper runner-up in ACM SIGSPATIAL 2023.
    NSF CAREER Award 2023.
    Microsoft Research Award 2023.
    Google-CAHSI Research Award 2023.
    Best research paper runner-up in IEEE MDM 2023.
    Top-5 best papers of SSTD 2023, invited to Springer GeoInformatica special issue.
    NSF CRII Award 2019.
    Best research paper candidate in ACM SIGSPATIAL 2019, invited to IEEE TSAS.
    Best research paper candidate in IEEE ICDE 2014, invited to IEEE TKDE special issue.
    Finalist in Microsoft Research Ph.D. Fellowship 2014, Data Management and Data Mining.
    Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship 2015, University of Minnesota.
    Best demonstration award in UMN U-Spatial Symposium 2012 and 3rd in U-Spatial Symposium 2014.
    Ten travel grants to major conferences in databases and spatial databases.
    Prof. Naaem Aboutaleb award for academic excellence - Alexandria University - 2008. (awarded to top two students among all the department's 67 students)
    Bronze medals in 3rd and 4th Egyptian Olympiad in Informatics (EOI 2005 and 2006).
    National Scholarship for Academic Excellence, Egyptian Ministry of Higher Education - 2003 (among top 0.1% students nation-wide)

Invited Talks

Geospatial Data Science Series, University of Wisconsin, Madison - 2024.
Google, Madison, Wisconsin - 2024.
King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), Saudi Arabia - 2023.
Qatar Computing Research Institute (QCRI), Qatar - 2023.
Doha Data Forum for Inclusive Data Ecosystems and Effective Decision Making, Qatar - 2023.
Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore - 2023.
Alexandria University, Egypt - 2023.
Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, University of California, Riverside - 2023.
University of Maryland - College Park - 2023.
Iowa State University - 2023.
Lighting Talk, University of California GIS Week - 2021.
Department of Statistics, University of California, Riverside - 2021.
University of California - Santa Barbara - 2019.
Keynote talk in the 2019 International Portable Emissions Measurement System (PEMS) Conference.
SoCal Social Workshop - 2018.
University of California - Irvine - 2018.

Funding

NSF logo     PI - NSF Award IIS-2237348: CAREER: Scalable Spatial Data Science on User-generated Data. PI: Amr Magdy, $531,707, 4/1/2023-3/31/2028.
Google logo     PI - Google-CAHSI Award: Scalable Spatial Regionalization in Spatial Spherical Spaces. PI: Amr Magdy, $100,000, 9/1/2023-8/30/2024.
Microsoft logo     PI - Microsoft Award: Near-Real-Time Inference on the Edge. PI: Amr Magdy, $70,000, 1/1/2024-12/31/2024.
NSF logo     PI - NSF Award IIS-1849971: CRII: III: Scalable Noise-filtering and Community Queries on User-generated Data. PI: Amr Magdy, $174,854, 8/15/2019-7/31/2021.
NSF logo     Co-PI - NSF Award SES-1831615: RIDIR: Scalable Geospatial Analytics for Social Science Research. PI: Sergio Rey, Co-PIs: Ran Wei, Amr Magdy, Vassilis Tsotras, $1,000,000, 10/1/2018-9/30/2021.
NSF logo     Co-PI - NSF Award CNS-2031418: Collaborative Research: Encoding Geography - Scaling up an RPP to achieve inclusive geocomputational education. PI: Coline Dony, Co-PIs: Sergio Rey, Amr Magdy, Rachel Russell, $999,979, 1/1/2021-12/31/2023.
NSF logo     Senior Personnel - NSF Award IIS-2123444: Collaborative Research: HDR DSC: DS-PATH: Data Science Career Pathways in the Inland Empire. PI: Mariam Salloum, Co-PIs: Analisa Flores, Xinping Cui, Paea LePendu, Vassilis Tsotras, $1,025,000, 10/1/2021-9/30/2024.
NSF logo     Senior Personnel - NSF Award CNS-1837577: Encoding Geography: Building Capacity for Inclusive Geo-Computational Thinking with Geospatial Technologies. PI: Coline Dony, Co-PIs: Atsushi Nara, Sergio Rey, Michael Solem, $299,989, 11/1/2018-10/31/2020.

Research Projects

Scalable Spatial Data Science for Social Scientists

Geospatial logo
Through an interdisciplinary team of geographic information scientists and computer scientists, this project provides the next generation of scalable and high performance spatial analytical techniques. The main project goal is bridging two worlds: the spatial data management and geospatial analysis libraries that perform complex statistical analysis on geospatial datasets. This requires addressing the existing challenges that have hindered intensive utilization of geospatial data from different sources for more extensive analysis. To achieve this, the project will innovate new computational algorithms and combine them with scalable spatial and spatio-temporal data management techniques for regionalization, polygon-based queries, spatial-aware clustering, computational inference, and more.

CSforAll: Computational Thinking in Education

CS4All project logo
This work is based on a researcher-practitioner partnership (RPP) to articulate K-12 and college pathways that will expand opportunities for all students to develop geo-computational thinking skills. This pilot RPP is composed of geographers, computer science educators, and geospatial technology specialists experienced in serving underrepresented minority students and communities. This exploratory research is to inform educational standards and tested approaches to help institutions understand the capacity they need to modernize geography education. The efforts is being extended to other scientific curriculum, such as biology and chemistry.

Scalable Analysis on User-generated Data

Kite logo on kite.cs.umn.edu
This project innovates scalable techniques and systems for Microblogs data, e.g., tweets, online reviews on TripAdvisor, Yelp, or Amazon, user comments on news websites, or social media micro-posts like comments, check-ins and interactions. We produced system prototypes, Kite and Taghreed.The ultimate goal of these systems is to serve as a scalable backend that facilitate building applications on top of Microblogs data hiding all the data management details from the developers, just like database systems work as backend for relational data applications. Taghreed is already powering a startup company serving social media analysis services for Middle Eastern customers, initially incubated by Wadi Makkah innovation incubator.

Publications

A full list of publications is maintained on DBLP

Book Chapters

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    Amr Magdy. Query Processing: Computational Geometry. Chapter in Encyclopedia of Big Data Technologies, Springer International Publishing, Editors: Sherif Sakr and Albert Zomaya, 2020.
    Amr Magdy. Query Processing: Computational Geometry. Chapter in Encyclopedia of Big Data Technologies, Springer International Publishing, Editors: Sherif Sakr and Albert Zomaya, 2018.
    Mohamed Sarwat, Jie Bao, Chi-Yin Chow, Justin Levandoski, Amr Magdy, and Mohamed F. Mokbel. Context Awareness in Mobile Systems. Chapter in Data Management in Pervasive Systems book, Data-Centric Systems and Applications Book Series, Springer Verlag, Editors: Francesco Colace, Massimo De Santo, Vincenzo Moscato, Antonio Picariello, Fabio A. Schreiber, and Letizia Tanca, 2015.

Patents

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    Mohamed Fathalla Hassan Mokbel, Amr Magdy Mahmoud Ahmed. System and Method for Microblogs Data Management. Provisionally filed in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office on September 10, 2014, Ref number: 434819US8.
    Thanaa Ghanem, Sohaib Ghani, Mohamed Mokbel, Mashaal Musleh, Amr Magdy. System And Method For Data Visualization. Provisionally filed in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office on January 5, 2017, Ref number: 20170004190.

Teaching

    Spring 2024: CS 179G - Senior Project in Big Data Analysis
    Winter 2024: CS 236 - Advanced Database Management Systems
    Fall 2023: CS 225 - Spatial Computing
    Winter 2023: CS 141 - Intermediate Data Structures and Algorithms
    Fall 2022: CS 10C - Introduction to Data Structures and Algorithms
    Fall 2022: CS 225 - Spatial Computing
    Spring 2022: CS 10C - Introduction to Data Structures and Algorithms
    Winter 2022: CS 10C - Introduction to Data Structures and Algorithms
    Fall 2021: CS 225 - Spatial Computing
    Spring 2021: CS 10C - Introduction to Data Structures and Algorithms
    Winter 2021: CS 10C - Introduction to Data Structures and Algorithms
    Fall 2020: CS 225 - Spatial Computing
    Winter 2020: CS 225 - Spatial Computing
    Fall 2019: CS 141 - Intermediate Data Structures and Algorithms
    Fall 2018: CS 141 - Intermediate Data Structures and Algorithms
    Spring 2018: CS 260 - Spatial Data Modeling and Analysis
    Winter 2018: CS 141 - Intermediate Data Structures and Algorithms
    Spring 2016: CSci 5708: Architecture and Implementation of Database Management Systems (at University of Minnesota)

News Depot

    Aug 2019: Received NSF CRII award to support scalable queries for scientific explorations on user-generated data.
    Aug 2019: Full research paper and demo paper accepted to appear in ACM SIGSPATIAL 2019.
    Jul 2019: Research paper accepted to appear in Springer GeoInformatica journal.
    Jun 2019: Research vision paper accepted to appear in SSTD 2019.
    Jun 2019: Full research survey paper accepted to appear in VLDB Journal.
    Jun 2019: Serving as a reviewer for grant proposals for Puerto Rico Science, Technology & Research Trust, Puerto Rico
    May 2019: Serving as a technical program committee member for IEEE ICDE 2020
    May 2019: General co-chair for ACM SIGSPATIAL GeoEd 2019 Workshop
    May 2019: General co-chair for ACM SIGSPATIAL LENS 2019 Workshop
    April 2019: Serving as a technical program committee member for ACM SIGSPATIAL 2019 conference
    Mar 2019: Delivering a keynote talk on spatio-temporal big data management and its applications on vehicles in the 2019 International Portable Emissions Measurement System (PEMS) Conference.
    Feb 2019: Serving as a technical program committee member for the International Symposium on Spatial and Temporal Databases (SSTD) 2019.
    Feb 2019: Serving as a registration chair for the International Symposium on Spatial and Temporal Databases (SSTD) 2019.
    Feb 2019: Serving as a publicity co-chair for IEEE Big Data 2019 conference
    Jan 2019: Organizing one-day workshop on Geospatial Data Science in collaboration with ESRI .
    Nov 2018: Full research paper accepted to appear in the Journal of Location Based Services.
    Nov 2018: Serving as a publicity co-chair for ACM SIGSPATIAL 2019 conference
    Nov 2018: Serving as a technical program committee member for Innovate-Data 2019
    Oct 2018: Serving as a technical program committee member for IEEE MDM 2019
    Sep 2018: $1M NSF grant awarded to support Scalable Geospatial Analytics for Social Science Research.
    Sep 2018: New NSF grant awarded for developing geo-computational curriculum and Building Capacity for Inclusive Geo-Computational Thinking. In collaboration with the American Association of Geographers and San Diego State University.
    Aug 2018: Full research paper accepted in ACM SIGSPATIAL 2018 conference.
    Jul 2018: General co-chair for ACM SIGSPATIAL LENS 2018 Workshop
    Jun 2017: Serving as a reviewer for grant proposals for National Science Foundation (NSF), USA
    Jun 2018: Presenting Big Data Research: An Overview in CS4All Code Camp at UC Riverside
    May 2018: Serving as a technical program committee member for ACM SIGSPATIAL 2018 conference
    May 2018: Presenting A Bird's-eEye View on Microblogs Data Analysis in SoCal Social Workshop at UC Irvine
    Apr 2018: My PhD dissertation has been selected as the sole departmental nominee for the Best Dissertation Competition.
    Apr 2018: Serving as a guest editor for a special issue in Frontiers in Big Data.
    Mar 2018: An encyclopedic article published in Springer Encyclopedia of Big Data Technologies: Query Processing: Computational Geometry.
    Jan 2018: A position paper contributed to NSF GSI workshop on GEOSPATIAL SOFTWARE: CONNECTING BIG DATA WITH GEOSPATIAL DISCOVERY AND INNOVATION.
    Dec 2017: Serving as a reviewer for grant proposals for Natural Sciences and Engineering Research of Canada (NSERC), Canada
    Nov 2017: Serving as a technical program committee member for SSDBM 2018
    Nov 2017: Presenting Kite: A Scalable Microblogs Data Management System in Information Systems Group (ISG) Seminar at UC Irvine
    Oct 2017: Serving as a treasurer co-chair ACM SIGSPATIAL 2018 conference
    Oct 2017: Serving as a guest editor for a special issue in Springer GeoInformatica
    Jul 2017: Thomson Reuters is sponsoring the ACM SIGSPATIAL LENS 2017 Workshop
    Jul 2017: Officially joined UC Riverside CSE Department as an Assistant Professor
    Jun 2017: General co-chair and sponsorship chair for ACM SIGSPATIAL LENS 2017 Workshop
    Jan 2017: Kite demo paper accepted in IEEE ICDE 2017.
    Jan 2017: The first version of Kite system is released.
    Sep 2016: A full paper accepted in ACM SIGSPATIAL 2016.
    Mar 2016: A tutorial accepted in ACM SIGMOD 2016.
    Dec 2015: A tutorial and two full papers accepted in IEEE ICDE 2016
    Dec 2015: A tutorial, a full research paper, and a full industrial paper accepted in IEEE ICDE 2016.
    Oct 2015: A full research paper accepted in IEEE TKDE.
Amr Magdy, Mohamed F. Mokbel, Sameh Elnikety, Suman Nath, and Yuxiong He. "Venus: Scalable Real-time Spatial Queries on Microblogs with Adaptive Load Shedding". In IEEE Transactions on Data Engineering, October, 2015.
    Jun 2015: A full industrial paper in IEEE MDM 2015.
Amr Magdy and Mohamed F. Mokbel. "Towards a Microblogs Data Management System". In Proceeding of IEEE International Conference on Mobile Data Management, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, June, 2015.
    Apr 2015: A demo paper accepted in IEEE ICDE 2015.
Amr Magdy, Louai Alarabi, Saif Al-Harthi, Mashaal Musleh, Thanaa M. Ghanem, Sohaib Ghani, Saleh Basalamah, and Mohamed F. Mokbel. "Demonstration of Taghreed: A System for Querying, Analyzing, and Visualizing Geotagged Microblogs". In Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering, ICDE 2015, Seoul, South Korea, April, 2015.
    Oct 2014: Our full research paper in IEEE ICDE 2014 has been selected among best ICDE papers and invited to TKDE special issue.
    Sep 2014: A full paper accepted in ACM SIGSPATIAL 2014.
Amr Magdy, Louai Alarabi, Saif Al-Harthi, Mashaal Musleh, Thanaa M. Ghanem, Sohaib Ghani, and Mohamed F. Mokbel. "Taghreed: A System for Querying, Analyzing, and Visualizing Geotagged Microblogs". In Proceeding of the ACM SIGSPATIAL International Conference on Advances in Geographic Information Systems, ACM SIGSPATIAL 2014, Dallas, TX, November, 2014.
    Sep 2014: A demo paper accepted in ACM SIGSPATIAL 2014.
Thanaa M. Ghanem, Amr Magdy, Mashaal Musleh, Sohaib Ghani, and Mohamed F. Mokbel. "VisCAT: Spatio-Temporal Visualization and Aggregation of Categorical Attributes in Twitter Data". In Proceeding of the ACM SIGSPATIAL International Conference on Advances in Geographic Information Systems, ACM SIGSPATIAL 2014, Dallas, TX, November, 2014.
    Jun 2014: A research paper accepted in GeoRich 2014 workshop, in conjunction with SIGMOD 2014.
Amr Magdy, Thanaa M. Ghanem, Mashaal Musleh, and Mohamed F. Mokbel. "Exploiting Geo-tagged Tweets to Understand Localized Language Diversity". In Proceedings of the First International ACM Workshop on Managing and Mining Enriched Geo-Spatial Data, GeoRich 2014, in conjunction with the ACM SIGMOD Conference on Management of Data, SIGMOD 2014, Snowbird, UT, June, 2014.
    Oct 2013: A full research paper accepted in IEEE ICDE 2014.
Amr Magdy, Mohamed F. Mokbel, Sameh Elnikety, Suman Nath, and Yuxiong He. "Mercury: A Memory-Constrained Spatio-temporal Real-time Search on Microblogs". In Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering, ICDE 2014, Chicago, IL, April, 2014.
    Oct 2013: Two demo papers accepted in IEEE ICDE 2014.