Cyrus Shahabi

Cyrus Shahabi
Born
Iran
Alma mater
Known for
  • Geospatial information management
  • Spatial indexing
  • Spatial skyline queries
  • Spatial crowdsourcing
  • Location Privacy
  • Intelligent Transportation
  • Mobility Models
  • Spatial AI
Awards
HonorsFellow of the IEEE, NAI Fellow
Scientific career
Fields
  • Computer science
  • Information management
Workplaces

Cyrus Shahabi is an Iranian-American computer scientist and a 2003 recipient of the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers.[1] He is the Helen N. and Emmett H. Jones Professor of Engineering and Professor of Computer Science, Electrical and Computer Engineering, and Spatial Sciences at USC. He is also director of the Integrated Media Systems Center and the Information Laboratory at USC.[2] Shahabi’s research focuses on spatial and spatiotemporal data management, geospatial information systems, location-based services, mobility data, spatial crowdsourcing, location privacy, intelligent transportation systems, and spatial artificial intelligence.

Biography

Shahabi received his bachelor's degree in computer engineering from the Sharif University of Technology in 1989, followed by a master's degree and PhD in computer science from the University of Southern California (USC) in May 1993 and August 1996 respectively. He currently serves as director of the Integrated Media Systems Center and the Information Laboratory at USC.[3]

After completing his Ph.D., Shahabi joined USC, where he has held faculty appointments in computer science, electrical and computer engineering, and spatial sciences. He has directed the USC Information Laboratory since 1997 and the Integrated Media Systems Center since 2010. He served as chair of the USC Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science from 2017 to 2022.

Shahabi received an Okawa Foundation Research Grant for Information and Telecommunications in 2001, a National Science Foundation CAREER award in 2002, a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers in 2003, and the Association for Computing Machinery Distinguished Scientist award in 2009. He is a fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and National Academy of Inventors and is the author or co-author of more than 300 peer-reviewed articles.[4] He received the ACM SIGSPATIAL 10-Year Impact Award in 2023. He chaired the founding nomination committee of ACM SIGSPATIAL for its first term (2008-2011 term). He was the chair of the ACM SIGSPATIAL (2017-2020 term).

Research

Shahabi is best known for contributions to geospatial information management and spatiotemporal data systems. His work includes spatial indexing and query processing[5], road-network queries[6], Voronoi-based indexing[7], spatial skyline queries[8], geospatial data integration[9][10], participatory sensing[11], spatial crowdsourcing[12], location privacy[13], geo-social systems[14], ride-sharing[15], traffic forecasting[16], and mobility analytics[17].

His early work contributed to spatial network query processing[18], including road-network nearest-neighbor search[6] and spatial skyline queries[8]. With Mehdi Sharifzadeh, he introduced spatial skyline queries at VLDB 2006. He also contributed to TSA-tree[19], a wavelet-based index structure for time-series data, and the Clustered Aggregation technique for wireless sensor networks[20].

Shahabi’s later work coined the term spatial crowdsourcing[12], including the GeoCrowd framework, which introduced a taxonomy and query-answering framework for assigning location-based tasks to mobile workers. He has also worked on location privacy, including privacy-preserving spatial queries[13] and privacy protection in spatial crowdsourcing[21][22]. In intelligent transportation and mobility, Shahabi has contributed to traffic forecasting[23], routing[24], ride-sharing[15], and mobility modeling[17]. His work[16] with Yaguang Li, Rose Yu, Ugur Demiryurek, and Yan Liu introduced the Diffusion Convolutional Recurrent Neural Network, or DCRNN, for traffic forecasting, a graph neural network model that represents traffic flow as diffusion on a directed road network.

More recently, Shahabi’s research has expanded into spatial artificial intelligence, including mobility foundation models[25], learned spatial representations[26][27], privacy-preserving spatial data release[28], and neural approaches for spatial and spatiotemporal data management[29] with theoretical bounds[30][31][32]. His Google Scholar profile lists more than 35,000 citations.

Systems and technology transfer

Shahabi has led or contributed to several spatial and multimedia data systems, including Yima[33], GeoDec[9][34][35][36], ProDA[37], GeoSIM[38], MediaQ[39], Janus[40], ADMS[41], and W4H[42][43]. These systems address geospatial decision support, large-scale data analysis, participatory sensing, transportation data management, multimedia data management, and wearable-data acquisition and analytics. Several of these systems were transferred to or deployed by organizations including LA Metro, Chevron, NGA’s GeoQ, and NASA JPL.

He co-founded Geosemble Technologies, a geospatial data integration company acquired in 2012[44], and TallyGo[45]/ClearPath[46], a routing and navigation company.

References

  1. ↑ "Cyrus Shahabi". University of Southern California. Retrieved December 26, 2013.
  2. ↑ "Cyrus Shahabi". University of Southern California. Retrieved July 14, 2026.
  3. ↑ "Cyrus Shahabi". University of Southern California. Retrieved July 14, 2026.
  4. ↑ "Cyrus Shahabi". Google Scholar. Retrieved December 26, 2013.
  5. ↑ Mehdi Sharifzadeh, Cyrus Shahabi: VoR-Tree: R-trees with Voronoi Diagrams for Efficient Processing of Spatial Nearest Neighbor Queries. Proc. VLDB Endow. 3(1): 1231-1242 (2010)
  6. 1 2 Mohammad R. Kolahdouzan, Cyrus Shahabi: Voronoi-Based K Nearest Neighbor Search for Spatial Network Databases. VLDB 2004: 840-851
  7. ↑ Cyrus Shahabi, Mehdi Sharifzadeh: Voronoi Diagrams. Encyclopedia of Database Systems (2nd ed.) 2018
  8. 1 2 Mehdi Sharifzadeh, Cyrus Shahabi: The Spatial Skyline Queries. VLDB 2006: 751-762
  9. 1 2 Cyrus Shahabi, Farnoush Banaei Kashani, Ali Khoshgozaran, Luciano Nocera, Songhua Xing: GeoDec: A framework to visualize and query geospatial data for decision-making. IEEE Multimedia Magazine 17(3): 14-23 (2010)
  10. ↑ "Geo-immersion: Matching Real-time Data With Maps". LiveScience.
  11. ↑ Leyla Kazemi, Cyrus Shahabi: A privacy-aware framework for participatory sensing. SIGKDD Explor. 13(1): 43-51 (2011)
  12. 1 2 Leyla Kazemi, Cyrus Shahabi: GeoCrowd: enabling query answering with spatial crowdsourcing. SIGSPATIAL/GIS 2012: 189-198
  13. 1 2 Gabriel Ghinita, Panos Kalnis, Ali Khoshgozaran, Cyrus Shahabi, Kian-Lee Tan: Private queries in location based services: anonymizers are not necessary. SIGMOD Conference 2008: 121-132
  14. ↑ Huy Pham, Cyrus Shahabi, Yan Liu: EBM: an entropy-based model to infer social strength from spatiotemporal data. SIGMOD Conference 2013: 265-276
  15. 1 2 Mohammad Asghari, Dingxiong Deng, Cyrus Shahabi, Ugur Demiryurek, Yaguang Li: Price-aware real-time ride-sharing at scale: an auction-based approach. SIGSPATIAL/GIS 2016: 3:1-3:10
  16. 1 2 Yaguang Li, Rose Yu, Cyrus Shahabi, Yan Liu: Diffusion Convolutional Recurrent Neural Network: Data-Driven Traffic Forecasting. ICLR 2018
  17. 1 2 Maria Despoina Siampou, Shushman Choudhury, Shang-Ling Hsu, Neha Arora, Cyrus Shahabi: Mobility-Embedded POIs: Learning What A Place Is and How It Is Used from Human Movement. ICML 2026
  18. ↑ Cyrus Shahabi: Road Networks. Encyclopedia of Database Systems (2nd ed.) 2018
  19. ↑ Cyrus Shahabi, Xiaoming Tian, Wugang Zhao: TSA-Tree: A Wavelet-Based Approach to Improve the Efficiency of Multi-Level Surprise and Trend Queries on Time-Series Data. SSDBM 2000: 55-68
  20. ↑ Sunhee Yoon, Cyrus Shahabi: The Clustered AGgregation (CAG) technique leveraging spatial and temporal correlations in wireless sensor networks. ACM Trans. Sens. Networks 3(1): 3 (2007)
  21. ↑ Hien To, Gabriel Ghinita, Cyrus Shahabi: A Framework for Protecting Worker Location Privacy in Spatial Crowdsourcing. Proc. VLDB Endow. 7(10): 919-930 (2014)
  22. ↑ Hien To, Cyrus Shahabi, Li Xiong: Privacy-Preserving Online Task Assignment in Spatial Crowdsourcing with Untrusted Server. IEEE ICDE 2018: 833-844
  23. ↑ Dingxiong Deng, Cyrus Shahabi, Ugur Demiryurek, Linhong Zhu, Rose Yu, Yan Liu: Latent Space Model for Road Networks to Predict Time-Varying Traffic. ACM KDD 2016: 1525-1534
  24. ↑ Mehdi Sharifzadeh, Mohammad R. Kolahdouzan, Cyrus Shahabi: The optimal sequenced route query. VLDB J. 17(4): 765-787 (2008)
  25. ↑ Maria Despoina Siampou, Shang-Ling Hsu, Shushman Choudhury, Neha Arora, Cyrus Shahabi: Toward Foundation Models for Mobility Enriched Geospatially Embedded Objects. SIGSPATIAL/GIS 2025: 774-779
  26. ↑ Maria Despoina Siampou, Jialiang Li, John Krumm, Cyrus Shahabi, Hua Lu: Poly2Vec: Polymorphic Fourier-Based Encoding of Geospatial Objects for GeoAI Applications. ICML 2025
  27. ↑ Chen Chu, Cyrus Shahabi: Geo2Vec: Shape- and Distance-Aware Neural Representation of Geospatial Entities. AAAI 2026 (Oral Presentation): 18985-18993
  28. ↑ Ritesh Ahuja, Sepanta Zeighami, Gabriel Ghinita, Cyrus Shahabi: A Neural Approach to Spatio-Temporal Data Release with User-Level Differential Privacy. Proc. ACM Manag. Data SIGMOD 1(1): 21:1-21:25 (2023)
  29. ↑ Sepanta Zeighami, Cyrus Shahabi, Vatsal Sharan: NeuroSketch: Fast and Approximate Evaluation of Range Aggregate Queries with Neural Networks. Proc. ACM Manag. Data SIGMOD 1(1): 100:1-100:26 (2023)
  30. ↑ Sepanta Zeighami, Cyrus Shahabi: On Distribution Dependent Sub-Logarithmic Query Time of Learned Indexing. ICML 2023: 40669-40680
  31. ↑ Sepanta Zeighami, Cyrus Shahabi: Theoretical Analysis of Learned Database Operations under Distribution Shift through Distribution Learnability. ICML 2024 (Oral Presentation): 58283-58305
  32. ↑ Sepanta Zeighami, Cyrus Shahabi: Towards Establishing Guaranteed Error for Learned Database Operations. ICLR 2024
  33. ↑ Cyrus Shahabi, Roger Zimmermann, Kun Fu, Shu-Yuen Didi Yao: Yima: A Second-Generation Continuous Media Server. IEEE Computer Magazine 35(6): 56-64 (2002)
  34. ↑ "Virtual world meets the real world". NBC News.
  35. ↑ "GeoDec: Enabling Geospatial Decision Making". Google TechTalks.
  36. ↑ "GeoDec: Enabling Geospatial Decision Making". Microsoft Research.
  37. ↑ Cyrus Shahabi, Mehrdad Jahangiri, Farnoush Banaei Kashani: ProDA: An End-to-End Wavelet-Based OLAP System for Massive Datasets. IEEE Computer Magazine 41(4): 69-77 (2008)
  38. ↑ Farnoush Banaei Kashani, Houtan Shirani-Mehr, Bei Pan, Nicholas Bopp, Luciano Nocera, Cyrus Shahabi: GeoSIM: A Geospatial Data Collection System for Participatory Urban Texture Documentation. IEEE Data Eng. Bull. 33(2): 40-45 (2010)
  39. ↑ Seon Ho Kim, Ying Lu, Giorgos Constantinou, Cyrus Shahabi, Guanfeng Wang, Roger Zimmermann: MediaQ: mobile multimedia management system. MMSys 2014: 224-235
  40. ↑ Cyrus Shahabi, Seon Ho Kim, Luciano Nocera, Giorgos Constantinou, Ying Lu, Yinghao Cai, Gérard G. Medioni, Ramakant Nevatia, Farnoush Banaei Kashani: Janus - Multi Source Event Detection and Collection System for Effective Surveillance of Criminal Activity. J. Inf. Process. Syst. 10(1): 1-22 (2014)
  41. ↑ Chrysovalantis Anastasiou, Jianfa Lin, Chaoyang He, Yao-Yi Chiang, Cyrus Shahabi: ADMSv2: A Modern Architecture for Transportation Data Management and Analysis. ARIC@SIGSPATIAL 2019: 25-28
  42. ↑ Arash Hajisafi, Maria Despoina Siampou, Jize Bi, Luciano Nocera, Cyrus Shahabi: Wearables for Health (W4H) Toolkit for Acquisition, Storage, Analysis and Visualization of Data from Various Wearable Devices. ICDE 2024: 5425-5428
  43. ↑ "How to Get a Diagnosis Without Setting Foot in a Doctor's Office? Try AI and Wearables". USC Viterbi.
  44. ↑ "TerraGo Acquires Geosemble Technologies".
  45. ↑ "TallyGo is a navigation platform that calculates traffic using a city's existing network of road sensors". TechCrunch.
  46. ↑ "Navigation App Helps Predict Traffic Conditions". Voice of America.
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