People: Shashi Shekhar

Shashi Shekhar

Department of Computer Science and Engineering
5-203 EE/CSci Building
University of Minnesota
shekhar@cs.umn.edu
http://www-users.cs.umn.edu/~shekhar
Ph: (612) 624-8307

Shashi Shekhar is Professor of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Minnesota. He received a B.Tech. in Computer Science from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, India, an M.S. in Business Administration, an M.S. and Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley.

Shekhar’s work in geographic information systems (GIS) includes spatial databases for managing spatial networks (e.g. road-maps), parallelization of GIS, routing algorithms for Advanced Traveler Information Systems, and archival of traffic measurements. The Shekhar group has developed some of the most efficient indexing methods for large roadmaps and algorithms for path evaluation as well as for computing shortest paths. Research sponsors include the National Science Foundation, National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Army Research Laboratories, Control Data Inc., U.S. Department of Transportation, and the Minnesota Department of Transportation.

His general area of research is data and knowledge engineering, with a focus on storage, management and analysis of scientific and geographic data, information and knowledge. The research is motivated by and has been applied to application areas including transportation (ITS), manufacturing and finance. In data engineering and database systems, my group has designed the Connectivity-Clustered Access Method (CCAM), a new storage and access method for spatial networks, which outperform alternative schemes in carrying out network computations. We have also worked with semantic query optimization and high performance geographic databases. In knowledge engineering, work has been done on the problem of discovery in database. Symbolic data mining techniques as well as neural networks have been studied. One of the fastest scalable parallel formulation of backpropagation learning algorithms for neural networks and these parallel formulations computing over one Giga connections per second were designed by my group.

Shekhar has published over 100 research papers in refereed journals, conferences, workshops and edited books and am currently co-authoring a book on spatial databases. Professional activities include editorial board membership for IEEE Transactions on Data and Knowledge Engineering, program co-chair for ACM International Conference on GIS (1996), membership on various panels of the National Science Foundation and National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Technical consulting has been done with the United Nation’s Development Program, Environment Systems Research Institute and the Minnesota Department of Transportation.