Mo Sarwat
Associate Professor
Computer Science and Engineering
School of Computing and AI
Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering
Arizona State University

Short Bio

Mo is an associate professor of computer science at Arizona State University. Dr. Sarwat is a recipient of the 2019 National Science Foundation CAREER award.  His general research interest lies in developing robust and scalable data systems for spatial and spatiotemporal applications. The outcome of his research has been recognized by two best research paper awards in the IEEE International Conference on Mobile Data Management (MDM 2015) and the International Symposium on Spatial and Temporal Databases (SSTD 2011), a best of conference citation in the IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE 2012) as well as a best vision paper award (3rd place) in SSTD 2017. Besides impact through scientific publications, Mo is also the co-architect of several software artifacts, which include Apache Sedona (a scalable system for processing big geospatial data) that is being used by major tech companies. He is an associate editor for the GeoInformatica journal and has served as an organizer / reviewer / program committee member for major data management and spatial computing venues. In June 2019, Dr. Sarwat has been named an Early Career Distinguished Lecturer by the IEEE Mobile Data Management community.


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Selected Publications


Recent News

  • [06.10.2022] On leave of absence to work on building a startup
  • [09.09.2021] Named the America Express Professor in Computing
  • [05.10.2021] Tenured and promoted to Associate Professor
  • [03.23.2021] Yuhan Sun successfully defended his PhD thesis and will join Microsoft Geospatial team
  • [02.16.2021] Two Journal papers accepted to ACM TODS and ACM TSAS
  • [09.21.2020] Paper on Visualizing Large-Scale Geospatial Data accepted to VLDB Journal
  • [08.01.2020] GeoSpark is now an Apache (incubating) project under the new name Apache Sedona
  • [05.18.2020] Jia Yu successfully defended his PhD thesis and will join Washington State University as an assistant professor in Fall 2020
  • [11.25.2019] Research paper on “Active Learning fo Entity Matching” accepted to ACM SIGMOD 2020
  • [06.12.2019] Named Early Career Distinguished Lecturer by the IEEE MDM community
  • [02.01.2019] Received the National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER award