Mohamed F. Mokbel

About

Mohamed F. Mokbel is a Professor and Distinguished McKnight University Professor in the Department of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Minnesota. He joined the department in 2005 and has since established a distinguished research career at the intersection of database systems and spatial communities. His research focuses on designing new algorithms and developing system modules that incorporate spatial awareness into various systems, including database systems, big data systems, knowledge-base systems, recommender systems, and machine learning systems. Mokbel's work supports critical applications that heavily rely on spatial data, such as urban computing, transportation, and geographic information systems (GIS). He has made significant contributions to the field, earning multiple awards including the IEEE Fellow in 2020, the ACM SIGSPATIAL 10-Year Impact Award in 2022, and being named a Distinguished McKnight University Professor in 2023. His educational background includes a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Purdue University and a master's and bachelor's degree in Computer Science and Automatic Control from Alexandria University. Mokbel has also served as the founding technical director at the Geographic Information Systems Technology Innovation Center and as the chief scientist at the Qatar Computing Research Institute.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Artificial Intelligence
• Data Mining
• Machine Learning
• Computer Security
• Database
• Real-time computing
• Transport engineering
• Embedded system
• Geography

Selected publications

• Mobility Data Science: Perspectives and Challenges

  ACM Transactions on Spatial Algorithms and Systems · 2024-05-07 · 22 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Mobility data captures the locations of moving objects such as humans, animals, and cars. With the availability of Global Positioning System (GPS)–equipped mobile devices and other inexpensive location-tracking technologies, mobility data is collected ubiquitously. In recent years, the use of mobility data has demonstrated a significant impact in various domains, including traffic management, urban planning, and health sciences. In this article, we present the domain of mobility data science. To…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Kamel: A Scalable BERT-Based System for Trajectory Imputation

  Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment · 2023-11-01 · 14 citations

  articleSenior author

  Numerous important applications rely on detailed trajectory data. Yet, unfortunately, trajectory datasets are typically sparse with large spatial and temporal gaps between each two points, which is a major hurdle for their accuracy. This paper presents Kamel; a scalable trajectory imputation system that inserts additional realistic trajectory points, boosting the accuracy of trajectory applications. Kamel maps the trajectory imputation problem to finding the missing word problem; a classical pro…

  PublisherDOI

• A Demonstration of KAMEL: A Scalable BERT-based System for Trajectory Imputation

  2023-06-04 · 11 citations

  articleSenior author

  This demo presents KAMEL; a novel trajectory imputation framework that aims to impute sparse trajectories as a means of increasing their accuracy, and hence the accuracy of their applications. Unlike the large majority of current trajectory imputation techniques, KAMEL does not require the knowledge or the availability of the underlying road network, which makes it applicable to important applications like map inference that need to infer the road network itself. Audience will experience KAMEL t…

  PublisherDOI

• Let's Speak Trajectories: A Vision to Use NLP Models for Trajectory Analysis Tasks

  ACM Transactions on Spatial Algorithms and Systems · 2024-04-08 · 8 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  The availability of trajectory data combined with various real-life practical applications has sparked the interest of the research community to design a plethora of algorithms for various trajectory analysis techniques. However, there is an apparent lack of full-fledged systems that provide the infrastructure support for trajectory analysis techniques, which hinders the applicability of most of the designed algorithms. Inspired by the tremendous success of the Bidirectional Encoder Representati…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Towards Mobility Data Science (Vision Paper)

  arXiv (Cornell University) · 2023-06-21 · 4 citations

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Mobility data captures the locations of moving objects such as humans, animals, and cars. With the availability of GPS-equipped mobile devices and other inexpensive location-tracking technologies, mobility data is collected ubiquitously. In recent years, the use of mobility data has demonstrated significant impact in various domains including traffic management, urban planning, and health sciences. In this paper, we present the emerging domain of mobility data science. Towards a unified approach…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Recent grants

• CAREER: Extensible Personalization of Spatial and Spatio-temporal Database Management Systems

  NSF · $530k · 2010–2017

• II-NEW: Research Infrastructure for Big Spatial and Temporal Data

  NSF · $392k · 2015–2020

• III: Small: Indexing, Querying, and Visualizing Big Spatial and Spatio-temporal Data

  NSF · $500k · 2015–2020

Frequent coauthors

• Walid G. Aref

  80 shared

• Ahmed Eldawy

  University of California, Riverside

  67 shared

• Mohamed Sarwat

  43 shared

• Jie Bao

  Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics

  40 shared

• Lei Chen

  The First Affiliated Hospital, Sun Yat-sen University

  38 shared

• China Becker

  Hong Kong University of Science and Technology

  36 shared

• Amr Magdy

  University of California, Riverside

  29 shared

• Justin J. Levandoski

  Google (United States)

  28 shared

Labs

• Mohamed F. MokbelPI

Awards & honors

• 2023: Distinguished McKnight University Professor
• 2022: ACM SIGSPATIAL 10-Year Impact Award
• 2020: IEEE Fellow
• 2017: ACM Distinguished Engineers, Scientists, and Members

Similar researchers at University of Minnesota

• Dan Knightsh-97
• Yousef Saadh-81
• Joseph Konstanh-74