Brief biography appropriate for invited talks

Shashi Shekhar is a McKnight Distinguished University Professor at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN, USA. He was elected an IEEE Fellow and received the IEEE Technical Achievement Award for contributions to spatial database storage methods, data mining, and geographic information systems(GIS). He is serving as a co-Editor-in-Chief of Geo-Informatica: An International Journal on Advances in Computer Sc. for GIS (ISSN 1384-6175) as well as an Encyclopedia of GIS (Springer, 2008, isbn 978-0-387-30858-6) and a member of the steering committee of the ACM Intl. Conference on GIS. He served on two committees of the National Research Council National Academy of Sciences, namely, the committee on mapping sciences (2004-2009) and the committee to review the basic and applied research at National Geo-spatial Intelligence Agency (2005). He has served as a member of the Board of Directors of University Consortium on GIS (2003-2004), a member of the editorial boards of IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, a member of the IEEE-CS Computer Science \& Engineering Practice Board, a program co-chair of the ACM Intl. Workshop on Advances in Geographic Information Systems (1996), and a technical advisor to United Nations Development Program (UNDP), Environmental Systems Research Institute (ESRI), and other organizations. His research projects have been sponsored by the NSF, NASA, Army Research Laboratories, USDOT, FHWA, MN/DoT etc. He has co-authored a textbook on Spatial Databases (Prentice Hall, 2003, ISBN 0-13-017480-7) which has been translated into two foreign languages. He has published over 200 research papers in peer-reviewed journals, books, and conferences, and workshops. He received a Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from the University of California (Berkeley, CA). More details are available from http://www.cs.umn.edu/\~shekhar.