09 April, 2018
Seminar on Data-Intensive Paradigms for Vehicle RoutingProf. Christian S. Jensen, the Obel Professor of Computer Science at Aalborg University, Denmark, visited HKUST and gave a talk on Data-Intensive Paradigms for Vehicle Routing jointly held by the Big Data Institute and Department of Computer Science and Engineering of HKUST on 9 April 2018.
As the society-wide digitalization unfolds, important societal processes are being captured at an unprecedented level of detail, in turn enabling us to better understand and improve those processes. Vehicular transportation is one such process, where the availability of vehicle trajectories holds the potential to enable better routing. In particular, the increasing availability of trajectory data renders the traditional routing paradigm, where a road network is modeled as a graph and weights are assigned to edges, obsolete. Instead, new and data-intensive paradigms that thrive on trajectory data are called for.
The talk covered several such paradigms, focusing on so-called cost-oblivious routing, where no cost or costs are associated with routes, but where historical trajectories are used “directly” for routing. Even massive trajectory collections are sparse in this setting, and a key challenge is to transfer trajectories to uncovered source-destination pairs so that routing can be done for any such pair.
Prof. Christian S. Jensen firstly stressed the importance of big data. If people do not have data, then they cannot do this kind of research. Transportation is a very important part of people's life, and vehicle transportation is an essential process across the world. In this talk, Prof. Christian S. Jensen covered different kinds of routing. His lively explanation drew much laughter from audience.
This is not the first time for Prof Christian S. Jensen to visit HKUST. He was recently with Aarhus University for three years and spent a one-year sabbatical at Google Inc., Mountain View. His research concerns data management and data-intensive systems, and its focus is on temporal and spatio-temporal data management. Christian is an ACM and an IEEE Fellow, and he is a member of Academia Europaea, the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters, and the Danish Academy of Technical Sciences. He has received several national and international awards for his research. He is Editor-in-Chief of ACM Transactions on Database Systems.