APPLE, GOOGLE AND THE SMARTPHONE MAPPING APPS APIS RACE

                            Hanan Samet**

                    Department of Computer Science

                        University of Maryland

                        College Park, MD 20742

                        e-mail:  hjs [at] cs.umd.edu

                       url:  www.cs.umd.edu/~hjs

 Abstract

Smartphones connect our physical and virtual environments like no previous technology. They bring vast volumes of information literally to our fingertips, and we carry them everywhere. The way we use our smartphones and interact with the virtual environment is evolving rapidly and unpredictably, as Apple, Google and their competitors continuously develop new operating systems and apps. In this lecture, Professor Samet will explore smartphone trends, rivalries and possibilities, focusing in particular on the latest developments in mapping apps.

* Best Paper Award,  1st ACM SIGSPATIAL International Workshop on Mobile Geographic Information Systems (MobiGIS 2012), Redondo Beach, CA, November 2012.  Also Communications of the ACM, 59(5):88--98, May 2016 and 59(9):58--67, September 2016. 

** Joint work with Brendan C. Fruin and Sarana Nutanong

Biography

Hanan Samet (http://www.cs.umd.edu/~hjs/) is a Distinguished University Professor of Computer Science at the University of Maryland, College Park and is a member of the Institute for Computer Studies.  He is also a member of the Computer Vision Laboratory at the Center for Automation Research where he leads a number of research projects on the use of hierarchical data structures for database applications involving spatial data.  He has a Ph.D. from Stanford University.  His doctoral dissertation dealt with proving the correctness of translations of LISP programs which was the first work in translation validation and the related concept of proof carrying code.  He is the author of the recent book "Foundations of Multidimensional and Metric Data Structures" published by Morgan-Kaufmann, San Francisco, CA, in 2006 (http://www.mkp.com/multidimensional), an award winner in the 2006 best book in Computer and Information Science competition of the Professional and Scholarly Publishers (PSP) Group of the American Publishers Association (AAP), and of the first two books on spatial data  structures titled "Design and Analysis of Spatial Data Structures" and "Applications of Spatial Data Structures: Computer  Graphics, Image Processing and GIS" published by Addison-Wesley, Reading, MA, 1990.  He is the Founding Editor-In-Chief of the ACM Transactions on Spatial Algorithms and System (TSAS), the founding chair of ACM SIGSPATIAL, a recipient of the 2009 UCGIS Research Award, 2011 ACM Paris Kanellakis Theory and Practice Award, the 2010 CMPS Board of Visitors Award at the University of Maryland, the 2014 IEEE Computer Society Wallace McDowell Award, and a Fellow of the ACM, IEEE, AAAS, IAPR (International Association for Pattern Recognition), and UCGIS (University Consortium for Geographic Science).  He received best paper awards in the 2007 Computers & Graphics Journal, the 2008 ACM SIGMOD and SIGSPATIAL ACMGIS Conferences, the 2012 SIGSPATIAL MobiGIS Workshop, and the 2013 SIGSPATIAL GIR Workshop, as well as a best demo paper award at the 2011 and 2016 SIGSPATIAL ACMGIS Conferences.  His paper at the 2009 IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE) was selected as one of the best papers for publication in the IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering.  He was elected to the ACM Council as the Capitol Region Representative for the term 1989-1991, and was an ACM Distinguished Speaker for the term 2008-2015.