Shekhar, Shashi2015-08-272015-08-272015-05-14https://hdl.handle.net/11299/174091Video presentation at the "Workshop on Digital Topographic Analysis: LiDAR, Satellite Imagery, Terrestrial Laser Scanning, and GIS" held at the University of Minnesota on May 14, 2015.From virtual globes (e.g., Google Maps) to global positioning system, spatial computing has transformed society via pervasive services (e.g., Uber and other location-based services), ubiquitous systems (e.g., geographical information system, spatial database management system), and pioneering scientific methods (e.g., spatial statistics). These accomplishment are just the tip of the iceberg and there is a strong potential for a compelling array of new breakthroughs such as spatial big data, localization indoors and underground, time-travel (and depth) in virtual globes, persistent monitoring of environmental hazards, accurate spatio-temporal predictive models, etc. For example, a McKinsey report projected an annual $600B saving from leveraging spatial big data (e.g., smart-phone trajectories) for novel eco-routing services to reduce wasted fuel, greenhouse gas emission and pollution exposure during unnecessary waits at traffic lights and in congestion. However, many fundamental research questions need to be investigated to realize the transformative potential. For example, how can spatial big data (e.g., smart-phone trajectories) be mined without violating privacy ? How can spatial statistical and machine learning algorithms be generalized to model geographic concepts (e.g., context, hot-spots, hot-features, doughnut-hole patterns), address spatio-temporal challenges (e.g., auto-correlation, non-stationarity, heterogeneity, multi-scale) and scale up to spatial big data ? How can eco-routing address the new challenges, e.g., waits at traffic-signals violate the sub-path optimality assumption in popular A* and Dijktra's algorithms? This presentation shares a perspective on the societal accomplishments, opportunities, and research needs in spatial computing based on a recent community report following the Computing Community Consortium workshop titled From GPS and Virtual Globes to Spatial Computing -- 2020 held at the National Academies.enVideo or Animation