EDBT 2026 Demo / reviewers in the wild / expert
Kevin A. Sparks
dblp:182/2074
· DBLP profile ↗
8ranked-venue papers in the field
1as first author
5since 2021 · last 2026
0000-0002-0340-8090ORCID · reported
Domains — venue-derived; a paper can count in several
Database Systems & Data Management · 7 (1 first)Big Data, Cloud & Distributed Data Systems · 1
| Year | Publication | Venue | Position |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2026 | "One Table to Rule Them All": How a Single Table can Enable Extensive Insights, Analytics and Assessment on Human Mobility Data
Debraj De, Kevin A. Sparks, Elizabeth C. McBride, Annetta Burger, James D. Gaboardi, Jesse McGaha, Chance Brown, Xiuling Nie, Todd Thomas, Carter Christopher, Gautam Malviya Thakur |
MDM | 2 |
| 2025 | Using Temporal Information from Human Mobility Data to Detect Anchor PointsabstractSpatiotemporal mobility data are available in massive quantities, but large quantities of data typically include fewer variables or data fields. Often, the only available fields are User ID, Longitude, Latitude, Timestamp ($U L L T$). This raises an important question: how much can we infer about human mobility patterns using only these four fields? With$U L L T$data, we do not know individuals' socioeconomic status information or when they are visiting their anchor points (AP) or locations (such as homes, places of employment, or schools), and it is a modern challenge to use this data to infer these characteristics. When detecting anchor locations with limited input information, verification and validation ($\mathrm{V} \quad \mathrm{V}$) are significant challenges. This paper addresses the problem of identifying individuals' anchor locations using only temporal information from spatiotemporal datasets with limited attributes. Our approach does not explicitly use latitude and longitude during analysis. Locationbased information is only employed in the preprocessing stage to identify periods of movement (trips) and stops (dwelling). Beyond this step, all analysis is based on temporal patterns. In theory, if stops and dwell times could be detected through alternative means, our method could function entirely without location-based input. We demonstrate this methodology on the 2017 National Household Travel Survey (NHTS) data, because it includes a carefully designed and collected time use survey with representative sampling and labeled ground truth. The high-quality survey data allows us to test the accuracy of our methods because NHTS contains intended place labels and agent/user characteristics. We have also applied our validated AP identification algorithm on very large-scale GPS based trajectory data for Patterns-of-Life (PoL) assessment and other applications, but due to space limit that could not be presented here. Elizabeth C. McBride, James D. Gaboardi, Chance Brown, Kevin A. Sparks, Debraj De, Annetta Burger, Jesse McGaha, Xiuling Nie, Todd Thomas, Gautam Malviya Thakur, Carter Christopher |
MDM | 4 |
| 2024 | HumoNet: A Framework for Realistic Modeling and Simulation of Human Mobility NetworkabstractUnderstanding, analyzing, and predicting human mobility and dynamics are valuable to solving pressing problems, developing effective plans, and prescribing timely remedies. As a computational approach, realistic human mobility simulations allow us to understand, analyze, and predict complex systems, including human societies. Accurate simulations rely on (1) the model that captures interactions and behaviors of myriad entities in our society and (2) the mapping of model instances to real-world entities. Taking this into account, this paper introduces the Human Mobility Network simulation framework (HumoNet), an integrated patterns of life (POL) simulation framework that leverages real-world data layers including transportation networks, points of interest, populations, popularity, and human trajectories. HumoNet is a data informed model in which agents are equipped with activities, locomotion, and planning capabilities. To simulate realistic kinematic maneuvers of individuals in transportation networks, HumoNet harnesses a microscopic traffic simulator that provides interaction among vehicles and traffic objects. In this paper, we describe the framework, outline our methodologies, and discuss the data processing and challenges of each data layer. Through experiments, we demonstrate that our simulations capture key features of human mobility by comparing them to the literature and real data using standard measures of human mobility (i.e., the radius of gyration, number of locations visited, level of exploration) and metrics scoring (i.e., Jensen-Shannon divergence). We envision that the synthetic data produced by HumoNet will serve as a benchmark for analyzing epidemics, deploying EV charging networks, and validating AI/ML tasks such as location prediction. Joon-Seok Kim 0001, Gautam Malviya Thakur, Licia Amichi, Annetta Burger, Chathika Gunaratne, Joseph V. Tuccillo, Taylor Hauser, Joseph Bentley, Kevin A. Sparks, Debraj De, Chance Brown, Elizabeth C. McBride, Jesse McGaha, James D. Gaboardi, Xiuling Nie, Carter Christopher |
MDM | 9 |
| 2024 | DICER: Data Intensive Computing Environment and Runtime for Evaluating Unprecedented Scale of Geospatial-Temporal Human Mobility DataabstractWith the significant increase in sources and volume of human mobility data through commercial data vendors as well as microsimulation of cities, the scale of geospatial-temporal data to analyze and assess for mobility characterization has grown to the level of Big Data. There are mobility related commercial organizations deploying scalable computing, but often the system architecture, workflow, and intermediate processing components are not fully disclosed in relevant scope. Current research literature has a notable lack of studies demonstrating architectures and workflows for human mobility analytics that are implemented on a TeraByte scale of geospatial-temporal data. In this context, this paper presents a hyperscale-level system solution named DICER (Data Intensive Computing Environment and Runtime) for processing and analytics of geospatial-temporal data at big data scale. Although the cluster computing architecture of DICER with Apache Spark job running on Kubernetes cluster is not new, there are innovations in the workflow, hierarchical processing logic, and a wide range of intermediate preprocessing and mobility metrics calculation. We have performed case studies to validate the effectiveness of DICER system solution by performing detailed analytics and assessment of human mobility microsimulation output at three different scopes and scale, including a usecase with 16.97 TeraByte and 259.2 Billion rows of data. In addition, we have presented another case study of utilizing DICER to perform the same mobility processing and comparative analytics on large-scale commercially available geospatial-temporal data. All these case studies validate the efficiency and usefulness of DICER in computing population mobility characteristics from geospatial-temporal trajectory data at an unprecedented scale (not only just data volume, but also combination of: number of user entities, temporal frequency, spatial resolution, data duration). Debraj De, Gautam Malviya Thakur, Jesse McGaha, Chance Brown, Xiuling Nie, Todd Thomas, James D. Gaboardi, Kevin A. Sparks, Annetta Burger, Elizabeth C. McBride, Joon-Seok Kim 0001, Licia Amichi, Chathika Gunaratne, Carter Christopher, Dan Zubko |
MDM | 8 |
| 2021 | Accelerated Assessment of Critical Infrastructure in Aiding Recovery Efforts During Natural and Human-made DisasterabstractRelief and recovery from disasters (both natural and human-made) require a coordinated approach across several federal and state government agencies. In order to achieve optimal resource allocation and deployment of first responders, accurate and timely assessment of the impact and extent of destruction are the cornerstones to any recovery effort. Ideally, this knowledge should be gathered and shared within the first 0-24 hours (termed as "Acute Phase" by the U.S. CDC guideline) for informed decision-making. But achieving this poses significant challenges for the data collection and data harmonization processes, particularly when voluminous data are being generated from diverse and distributed sources during the disaster responses. To this end, this work developed a scalable and efficient workflow to dynamically collect and harmonize crowd-sourced geographic multi-modal data, and then assess critical infrastructure (CI) damaged during disaster events. We demonstrate the application of our framework with two real-world experiences in addressing post-disaster recovery efforts - for the Bahamas (Natural - due to Hurricane Dorian, 2019) and Beirut (Human-made - due to explosion caused by the ammonium nitrate stored in a warehouse, 2020). We have illustrated that a coordinated effort is needed for planning as well as for execution to achieve informed decision making. Gautam S. Thakur, Kelly M. Sims, Chantelle Rittmaier, Joseph Bentley, Debraj De, Junchuan Fan, Tao Liu 0020, Rachel Palumbo, Jesse McGaha, Phil Nugent, Bryan Eaton, Jordan Burdette, Tyler Sheldon, Kevin A. Sparks |
SIGSPATIAL/GIS | 14 |
| 2020 | A global analysis of cities' geosocial temporal signatures for points of interest hours of operationabstractThe temporal nature of humans interaction with Points of Interest (POIs) in cities can differ depending on place type and regional location. Times when many people are likely to visit restaurants (place type) in Italy, may differ from times when many people are likely to visit restaurants in Lebanon (i.e. regional differences). Geosocial data are a powerful resource to model these temporal differences in cities, as traditional methods used to study cross-cultural differences do not scale to a global level. As cities continue to grow in population and economic development, research identifying the social and geophysical (e.g., climate) factors that influence city function remains important and incomplete. In this work, we take a quantitative approach, applying dynamic time warping and hierarchical clustering on temporal signatures to model geosocial temporal patterns for Retail and Restaurant Facebook POIs hours of operation for more than 100 cities in 90 countries around the world. Results show cities’ temporal patterns cluster to reflect the cultural region they represent. Furthermore, temporal patterns are influenced by a mix of social and geophysical factors. Trends in the data suggest social factors influence unique drops in temporal signatures, and geophysical factors influence when daily temporal patterns start and finish. Kevin A. Sparks, Gautam S. Thakur, Amol Pasarkar, Marie L. Urban |
Int. J. Geogr. Inf. Sci. | 1 |
| 2019 | Co-location Pattern Mining of Geosocial Data to Characterize Urban Functional SpacesabstractSpatial Co-location Pattern (SCP) mining continues to play a critical role in understanding the morphology of urban functional spaces of world cities. It requires a large amount of fine-granular data and computing efficiency to handle the combinatorial explosion of co-location patterns. To this end, this work has two main contributions - i) We showcase a novel approach to perform SCP mining to characterize intra-city scale structure of urban functionality or co-located activity patterns using geosocial Points-of-Interest (POI) vector data. ii) We present a generalized and optimized parallel/distributed SCP mining algorithm implemented on a Hadoop MapReduce system and demonstrate the utility of our approach using the city of Berlin (Germany) as an example. The SCPs tend to vary across Berlin's municipal boroughs and at different spatial scales. Our findings on Berlin's functional structure conform to existing urban geography models. Such a data-driven exploration of massive urban POIs using distributed computing is first of its kind and can help better understand the changing dynamics of urban functionality, as well as physical, and social network structure around the world. Arif Masrur, Gautam S. Thakur, Kevin A. Sparks, Rachel Palumbo, Donna J. Peuquet |
IEEE BigData | 3 |
| 2016 | Demonstrating PlanetSense: gathering geo-spatial intelligence from crowd-sourced and social-media dataabstractCrowd-sourced and volunteered information, social media, and participatory sensors are capable of providing real-time activity data. Monitoring these sources in time of relevance and then using them to gather operational knowledge is important during crisis management. Beyond that, it's important to curate this information for geo-spatial research purposes, including land use classification and population occupancy analysis. In this demonstration, we will showcase PlanetSense - a geo-spatial research platform built to harness the existing power of archived data and add to that, the dynamics of heterogeneous real-time streaming data from social media and volunteered sources, seamlessly integrated with sophisticated machine learning algorithms and visualization tools. A demonstration will focus on - 1) Recent initiative emphasizing the need to harness crowd-sources, volunteered, and social media data at scale; 2) Anatomy and insight into data collection workflow. We will show the ability to harvest and process several terabytes of raw data in real-time; 3) A detailed discussion with insight into more than 20 sources of data will be given. These sources include text, sensors, as well as imagery data; 4) PlanetSense's end to end distributed architecture will be discussed with focus on collecting and processing high-volumes of streaming data in a Geo-Data Cloud. Data fusion methods and algorithms for integrating disparate data sources with existing legacy products. Data analytics and machine learning methods for generating operational intelligence on the fly; 5) In addition, PlanetSense "App" platform will be shown with hands-on application enabling interested audience to quickly develop and deploy solutions. 6) Several case studies will be discussed relevant to, land use classification, monitoring transient population, high-resolution occupancy analysis, mapping special events population, ability to uncover global breaking events and reactions in near-real time, ability to track protest, unrest, and monitor other societal turbulences as they happen, and real-time monitoring of infrastructure outages. Gautam S. Thakur, Kevin A. Sparks, Roger G. Li, Robert N. Stewart, Marie L. Urban |
SIGSPATIAL/GIS | 2 |