Mahmoud SAKR

I am an assistant professor at the Data Science and Engineering Lab in the Brussels School of Engineering at the Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB). My research is in the area of data management, with focus on system development, and standardization.
I have special interest in managing spatial and spatiotemporal data, agnostic to the application domain.
Topics: responsible data science, database systems, big data, distributed data management, spatial and spatiotemporal data, international standards.

2024: General chair of the The 25th IEEE International Conference on Mobile Data Management , June 24 - June 27, 2024 Brussels, Belgium.
2024: Academic jury for the admission to the master of science in Computer Science and Engineering in the Brussels School of Engineering.
2022-now: Multiple roles in the organizing committee of ACM SIGSPATIAL Conference.
2021-2022: Issue Editor of GeoInformatica Journal Special Issue on Big Mobility Data Analytics (BMDA 2021), Springer.
2020-now: Chair of the Standards Working Group on Moving Features - Open Geospatial Consortium OGC MF-SWG. The goals for the SWG are to develop and maintain moving features standard; including data model, exchange formats, service inerfaces, and data quality.
2020: Member of the organization team of the Dagstuhl seminar on Mobility Data Science.
2020: Member of the organization team of BMDA@EDBT/ICDT workshop on Big Mobility Data Analysis.
2018-now: ULB coordinator of the Erasmus Mundus program on Big Data Management and Analytics BDMA
2016-now: Co-founder of the MobilityDB open source moving object database. MobilityDB extends PostgreSQL and PostGIS with temporal and spatiotemporal data types and operations to support the managment of mobility data in SQL.

July 2021: Appointed as Professor for the Chair on Big Data Management in the Engineering School of Brussels, ULB
Nov 2020: A first fruit of our collaboration with Microsoft Citus. My invited blog on how to analyze GPS movement trajectories at scale with PostgreSQL + MobilityDB, PostGIS, & Citus has been published in two channels: Microsoft Tech Community Azure Database for PostgreSQL, and in Citus Blog
Nov 2020: I gave an online seminar in the Ca' Foscari University of Venice on the topic of Moving Object Databases and the Implementation of MobilityDB in PostgreSQL.
Oct 2020: I am extremely happy that our Dagstuhl seminar proposal on Mobility Data Science has been accepted ! The seminar is organized by myself, Mohamed Mokbel, Li Xiong, and Andreas Züfle. The seminar aims at creating a multi-desciplinary community around Mobility Data Science.
Oct 2020: Acceptance of the BMDA@EDBT/ICDT workshop proposal. In its 4th edition, BMDA workshop will foster the exchange of new ideas on multidisciplinary real-world problems, discuss proposals about innovative solutions, and identify emerging opportunities for further research in the area of big mobility data analytics. Submit and join BMDA@EDBT/ICDT
August 2020: Acceptance of our paper on Distributed Spatiotemporal Trajectory Query Processing In SQL, in ACM SigSpatial 2020. preprint.
June 2020: Big news ! Acceptance of our paper 'MobilityDB: A Mobility Database based on PostgreSQL and PostGIS', in ACM TODS. preprint.

Mahmoud SAKR
Professor
Department of Computer and Decision Engineering
Data Science and Engineering Lab