Mohamed Ali

Biography

Mohamed Ali is an associate professor at the Institute of Technology, University of Washington, Tacoma. Mohamed’s research interests include the processing, analysis and visualization of data streams with geographic and spatial information. For the past decade, Mohamed has been building commercial spatiotemporal data streaming systems to cope with the emerging Big Data requirements.

In summer 2006, Mohamed visited the database group at Microsoft Research (MSR) where he and his colleagues ramped up the Complex Event Detection and Response (CEDR) project. Then, Mohamed joined the SQL Server group at Microsoft to productize the CEDR project. CEDR has shipped and brand-named as Microsoft StreamInsight®. Since the first public release of StreamInsight®, Mohamed has been advocating for “real-time spatiotemporal data management everywhere”; that is the use of StreamInsight® in monitoring, managing and mining real time geospatial information across a diversity of verticals. These verticals include but are not limited to: online advertising, behavioral targeting, business intelligence, computational finance, traffic management, social networking, homeland security, emergency and crisis management. In 2011, Mohamed started another journey at Microsoft Bing Maps where he became at the frontline with the Big Data challenge and where he battled various types of spatial search queries.

While at Microsoft, Mohamed has been also an affiliate of the University Washington where he taught database, data streaming and GIS classes. Mohamed has recently joined the University of Washington, Institute of Technology where he leads the geospatial data science team at the Center for Data Science.

Mohamed has been an active member of the ACM SIGSPATIAL GIS community. Mohamed received a PhD in computer science from Purdue University. Please contact him at mhali@uw.edu and visit his homepage at http://faculty.washington.edu/mhali/.