Honors and Awards

  1. Best Paper Award, IEEE International Conference on Data Mining (ICDM), 2021
  2. Best Applied Data Science Paper Award, SIAM International Conference on Data Mining (SDM), 2019
  3. Best Paper Honorable Mention at 1st International Symposium on Spatio-temporal Computing (ISSC), 2015
  4. Best Paper Award, ACM SIGSPATIAL Workshop on Analytics for Big GeoSpatial Data (BigSpatial), 2013
  5. Best Research Paper Award, International Symposium on Spatial and Temporal Databases (SSTD), 2011
  6. Excellent Student Paper Award, National Database Conference of China (NDBC), 2009

Funded Research Projects

  1. Co-PI. Iowa Healthy Lakes Initiative: A multi-dimensional approach to measuring informing, and solving Iowa’s Harmful Algal Bloom Challenge. Jumpstarting Tomorrow Grant, University of Iowa, $150,000, 1/2022 - 1/2023.
  2. PI. Smart Algal Blooms Detection and Forecasting through an AI-Powered UAV System. The Interdisciplinary, Scalable Solutions for a Sustainable Future (ISSSF) Seed Grant, University of Iowa. $40,000. 9/1/2020 - 8/31/2022.
  3. PI. Understanding Bicyclists' Behaviors Through Learning from Big Trip Data. SAFER-SIM University Transportation Center. $60,000. 7/1/2019 - 12/31/2021.
  4. PI, Understanding Co-location Patterns of Businesses through Mining Spatial Big Data. Tippie College of Business Research Excellence Grant, $6,000, 1/1/2020 - 12/31/2020.
  5. PI, "CRII: III: Discovering Complex Change Footprint Patterns on Spatio-temporal Big Data for Urban Sustainability", NSF CISE Research Initiation Initiative (CRII), $155,767. 7/1/2016-6/30/2019.
  6. PI, "Deep Learning Methods for Traffic Accident Prediction". NVIDIA Corp. Gift Research Hardware Award, 2017.
  7. PI, "Heterogeneous Network Data Analytics to Improve Urban Sustainability". Summer Interdisciplinary Research Grant 2016, Obermann Center for Advanced Studies, University of Iowa. $12,000, June 2016.