Associate Professor, Emory University
azufle*at*emory*dot*edu
My research has been focused on mining spatio-temporal data with applications in transportation, epidemiology, social science, and urban computing. I'm a computer scientist who is passionate to work interdisciplinary.
I have a special interest in Geosimulation as a new paradigm to combine large-scale data generation with data mining to improve decision-making.
My full CV can be found here.
I'm looking for highly motivated students and postdocs in data management, data mining, and machine learning. I'm particularly looking for students for the following projects. Following the links below for a quick overview of the projects and availability of student/postdoc funding:
06/2026: I've been elected as the Secretary of the ACM SIGSPATIAL! I'm looking forward to working with the new Chair of ACM SIGSPATIAL Dr. Goce Trajcevski, Vice Chair Flora Salim, and Treasurer Yao-Yi Chiang!
06/2026: Our ACM KDD Paper titled "An Infectious Disease Spread Simulation Based on Large Language Model Decision Making" was selected for an Oral Presentation (19.7% among all accepted KDD'26 papers, 6.1% among all valid KDD'26 submissions). Big congratulations Pro & Ruochen!
05/2026: Our paper titled An Infectious Disease Spread Simulation Based on Large Language Model Decision Making has been accepted ACM KDD'26 (AI4Science Track, Acceptance Rate 30.8%). Congratulations Pro & Ruochen!
05/2026: Our paper titled "Deep Identification of Propagation Trees in Graph Diffusion" has been accepted at the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI) 2026. Congratulations Zeeshan, Chen, Ruochen, and Vish! (Acceptance rates for IJCAI'26 have not yet been published, but have been between 14-19% in previous years)
04/2026: Our paper titled "Semantically Diverse Convoys" has been accepted at the 27th IEEE International Conference on Mobile Data Management (MDM'26) (Acceptance Rate 31%). Congratulations Abdullah!
03/2026: Our paper "PySGN: A Python package for constructing synthetic geospatial networks" has been accepted at the Journal of Open Source Software (JOSS) (Impact Factor 2.1).
02/2026: Our paper "Evaluation of Deep Learning Approaches for Classifying Regional Croplands With Satellite Image Time Series in Senegal" has been accepted at the IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Applied Earth Observations and Remote Sensing (J-STARS) (Impact Factor 5.3). Congratulations Tri!
01/2026: Our paper titled "Self-Supervised Contrastive Learning for Individual and Collective Outlier Detection in Semantic Trajectories" has been accepted at ACM Transactions on Spatial Algorithms and Systems (TSAS) (Impact Factor 1.6)
01/2026: Our Paper titled "Genomic-Informed Heterogeneous Graph Learning for Spatiotemporal Avian Influenza Outbreak Forecasting" has been accepted at The ACM Web Conference (WWW) 2026 (Acceptance Rate 21.6%). Congratulations Jing, Haley, and Yang!
12/2025: Our paper titled "Descriptor: Exploring Economic Sectoral Dynamics Through High-resolution Mobility Data (ESDM)" has been published in IEEE Data Descriptions. (New journal - no impact factor yet) Congratulations Hossein!
12/2025: Our paper titled "Synthetic population and urban mobility modeling using open and publicly available data-a Washington, DC COVID case study" has been accepted at Springer Computational Urban Science (Impact Factor 3.2). Congratulations Shiyang, Tunaggina, and Mengfei!
11/2025: Our Graduate Student Research Competition (SRC) paper titled "Spatial Inference on Phylogenetic Trees" received a Best Graduate Student Research Competition Runner-Up Award. Big congratulations to Emory Master's student Owen!
10/2025: Seven main conference papers accepted at ACM SIGSPATIAL'25!
A full research paper (Acceptance Rate 26%) titled "A Probabilistic Framework for Imputing Genetic Distances in Spatiotemporal Pathogen Models". Congratulations Haley, Jing, and Hao.
A short research paper (25.1%) titled "An Improvement to the Sliding Window Staypoint Detection Algorithm to Handle Dropouts". Congratulations Lance!
A full research paper accepted as a short paper (Acceptance Rate 39.5%) titled "Training Machine Learning Models on Human Spatio-temporal Mobility Data: An Experimental Study [Experiment Paper]". Congratulations Alex!
A full research paper accepted as a short paper (Acceptance Rate 39.5%) titled "HD-GEN: A Software System for Large-Scale Human Mobility Data Generation Based on Patterns of Life". Congratulations Hossein!
A demonstration paper (Acceptance Rate 48.8%) titled "EpiScale: Large-Scale Simulation of Infectious Disease Based on Human Mobility". Congratulations Ruochen!
A Graduate Student Research Competition (SRC) (Acceptance rates not published) paper titled "Spatial Inference on Phylogenetic Trees". Congratulations Owen!
A GISCup Paper titled (Acceptance Rate 10%) titled "Human Mobility Prediction via Sparse Mixture-of-Experts and Hybrid Multi-Scale Encoding". Congratulations Alex and Ruochen!
10/2025: Seven ACM SIGSPATIAL Workshop Papers accepted across four workshops:
Our paper titled "From Points to Places: Towards Human Mobility-Driven Spatiotemporal Foundation Models via Understanding Places" was accepted at the 1st ACM SIGSPATIAL International Workshop on Urban Mobility Foundation Models (UMFM'25). Well done, Mo!
Our paper titled "Generating and Understanding Large Datasets of Social Contact Patterns from Foot-Traffic Data" was accepted at the 1st ACM SIGSPATIAL International Workshop on Geospatial Computing for Public Health (GeoHealth'25). Well done Hossein and James!
Our paper titled "Mapping HIV Vulnerability: The Role of PrEP Accessibility and Economic Inequality in Atlanta, Georgia" was accepted at the 1st ACM SIGSPATIAL International Workshop on Geospatial Computing for Public Health (GeoHealth'25).
Our paper titled "Semantic Anomaly Detection in Human Trajectories: Preserving Behavioral Patterns Through Calendar Representations" was accepted at the 2nd ACM SIGSPATIAL International Workshop on Geospatial Anomaly Detection (GeoAnomalies'25). Well done Erfan, Mauryan, Alex, and Lance!
Our paper titled "Grounded Anomalies: Towards Causally Grounded Kinematic Anomaly Generation" was accepted at the 2nd ACM SIGSPATIAL International Workshop on Geospatial Anomaly Detection (GeoAnomalies'25).
Our paper titled "Your Friends Reveal Where You Are: Location Estimation based on Friends’ Locations in Geosocial Networks" was accepted at the 1st ACM SIGSPATIAL International Workshop on Spatial Intelligence for Smart and Connected Communities (SpatialConnect '25). Congratulations Ketevan!
Our paper titled "An Agile Design of Activity-based Mobility Intervention using Large Language Models" was accepted at the 8th ACM SIGSPATIAL International Workshop on Geospatial Simulation (GeoSim'25). Well done Jooyoung!
09/2025: We are honored to having received a $1.2M award from the NIH for our project titled "SCH: Towards Foundation Epidemic Models for Respiratory Infections: A Novel Spatiotemporal Machine Learning Framework". The PI for this project is Dr. Wei Jin and co-PIs are Drs. Max Lau, Ben Lopman, and myself.
07/2025: Our paper titled "Simulated Infectious Diseases Datasets with Controlled Data Bias" was accepted at the 31st ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (SIGKDD'25) (Acceptance Rate 23.7%). Congratulations Ruochen!
06/2025: Our paper titled "Towards using Tweet sentiment for infectious disease detection" at PLOS One (Impact Factor 3.2.). Congratulations James!
01/2025: Our paper titled "Commuting flow prediction using OpenStreetMap data" was accepted at Springer Computational Urban Science (Impact Factor 3.2).
11/2024: Our paper titled "Deep neural networks for endemic measles dynamics: Comparative analysis and integration with mechanistic models" has been accepted at PLOS Computational Biology (Impact Factor 4.3).
11/2024: Our paper titled "Simplifying traffic simulation - from Euclidean distances to agent-based models" was accepted at Springer Computational Urban Science (Impact Factor 3.2). Congratulations Tunaggina!
10/2024: Our paper titled "Transferable Unsupervised Outlier Detection Framework for Human Semantic Trajectories" was selected as one of four candidates for the best paper award at ACM SIGSPATIAL'24. Big congrats to Zheng Zhang & Hossein Amiri! (Update: We did not receive the best paper award but we're one of the runner-ups! \o/ )
09/2024: Two more workshop papers accepted at ACM SIGSPATIAL'24! One paper called GeoLife+ on simulating realistic human trajectories published at the ACM SIGSPATIAL'24 Workshop on GeoSimulation (congratulations Hossein!) and one paper on predicting human trajectories published at the ACM SIGSPATIAL'24 Human Mobility Prediction Challenge Workshop (congratulations PhD Students Ruochen, Hossein, Alex, Lance, and undergraduate student Misha Gupta).
09/2024: Four (!) papers accepted the 1st ACM SIGSPATIAL International Workshop on Geospatial Anomaly Detection (GeoAnomalies’24) showcasing our work in IARPA's HAYSTAC Program. The first paper presents a massive-scale agent-based simulated trajectory dataset called "Urban Anomalies" that includes anomalous trajectories as a benchmark for trajectory anomaly detection research (congrats Ruochen and Hossein!). Second, an approach towards detecting anomalies trajectories by interpreting the staypoints of a trajectory like words in a sentence to leverage large-language models to mine anomalies . Third, an approach using matrix factorization and collaborative filtering to detect anomalies in trajectories. Lastly but not leastly, an approach using kinematic profiles (speed, acceleration, turning behavior) of moving objects to detect anomalous trajectories.
08/2024: Two demonstrations papers accepted at ACM SIGSPATIAL'24! Including a demonstration of our Patterns of Life Human Mobility Simulation (Congratulations PhD Student Hossein Amiri and undergraduate student Will Kohn!) and a demonstration of our Infectious Disease Spread Simulation to Control Data Bias (congratulations PhD student Ruochen Kong!)
08/2024: Our paper titled "Transferable Unsupervised Outlier Detection Framework for Human Semantic Trajectories" was accepted as a full paper at ACM SIGSPATIAL'24. Congratulations to PhD Students Zheng Zhang & Hossein Amiri!
07/2024: Our community vision paper titled "Mobility Data Science: Perspectives and Challenges" which charts future directions, challenges, and opportunities for the field of mobility data science has been accepted to appear in ACM Transactions on Spatial Algorithms and Systems (TSAS). Congratulations to all our 48 authors on this herculean effort!
06/2024: Our paper titled "Leveraging Simulation Data to Understand Bias in Predictive Models of Infectious Disease Spread" was accepted to appear in ACM Transactions on Spatial Algorithms and Systems (TSAS). Congratulations to Ruochen Kong on her first journal paper as a PhD Student in my lab!
05/2024: Our paper titled "Spatial Transfer Learning for Estimating PM 2.5 in Data-poor Regions" has been accepted at ECML PKDD'24.
05/2024: Honored to having received an ACM SIGMOD Distinguished Program Committee Member Award.
05/2024: Our paper titled "Source Localization for Cross Network Information Diffusion" was accepted at KDD'24. Congratulations to graduate students Chen Ling and Tanmoy Chowdhury!
04/2024: Our paper titled "Leveraging Simulation Data to Understand Bias in Predictive Models of Infectious Disease Spread" was accepted at ACM Transactions on Spatial Algorithms and Systems (TSAS)
01/2024: Honored to join the IJGIS, the top Journal on Geo-Information Science, as an Associate Editor.
12/2023: Published a Book Chapter on GeoAI for Public Health!
11/2023: Honored to serve the ACM SIGSPATIAL as General Chair of the ACM SIGSPATIAL Conference 2024 in Atlanta, Georgia, USA!
11/2023: Honored to having received a Outstanding Vice PC Chairs at ACM SIGSPATIAL 2023!
11/2023: We received the Best Resource & Data Paper Award at ACM SIGSPATIAL 2023. Congratulations Hossein Amiri!
09/2023: Congratulations to Undergraduate Student Will Kohn for our paper accepted at the ACM SIGSPATIAL GeoSim'24 Workshop!
09/2023: Congratulations to High School Student Ketevan Gallagher for our paper accepted at the ACM SIGSPATIAL LocalRec'24 Workshop!
06/2023: Congratulations Hossein Amiri for our Data and Resource Track Paper accepted at ACM SIGSPATIAL!
05/2023: Joining IARPA's HAYSTAC Program to find outliers in human trajectory data to disrupt the boundaries of trajectory simulation and trajectory data mining.
04/2023: Exciting new research project funded by the NSF on Understanding Bias in Infectious Disease Models. This is a collaboration with The University of New South Wales (UNSW) Sydney.
08/2022: I'm starting at Emory University as an Acting Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science in Fall. Moving to Atlanta!
06/2022: Paper accepted at AnnSim'22 on synthetic population generation for geosimulations. Congratulations to Srihan Kotnana, a high school student who led this work.
04/2022: Paper accepted at MDM'22 on visualizing phylogenetic data. Congratulations to the first author Tri Le.
04/2022: Joining the Preparedness Summit in Atlanta to discuss lessons learned from the COVID-19 pandemic with health departments and researchers.
03/2022: Received NSF funding to support an undergraduate student in the Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) program to find spatio-temporal patterns in phylogenetic data.
01/2022: Organized a Dagstuhl seminar on Mobility Data Science with 47 participants. Feels good to brainstorm in-person once again!
11/2021: Excited to join the Organizing Committee of PREPARE (Pandemic Research for Preparedness and Resilience), an NSF-sponsored virtual organization tasked with fostering research collaborations and synthesizing critical pandemic-related research into a roadmap to help guide our nation’s response to the next pandemic (https://prepare-vo.org/). We're organizing a workshop on December 8th and 9th for NSF COVID-19 RAPIDs to present their results and collaborate across disciplines. Let me know if you would like to join the workshop!
11/2021: We received the Best Poster Award Runner-Up at ACM SIGSPATIAL 2021 for our Paper titled "Semantically Diverse Paths with Range and Origin Constraints". It is a collaborative work with Xu Teng and Goce Trajcevski from Iowa State University.
11/2021: Paper accepted at the Journal of Computational and Mathematical Organization Theory (CMOT, Springer Nature) on our DARPA work on simulating urban life.
11/2021: Paper accepted at PLoS One. Congratulations Justin Elarde for your work as an undergraduate student!
10/2021: I'm co-organizing the 2nd ACM SIGSPATIAL International Workshop on Spatial Computing for Epidemiology (SpatialEpi 2021) to be held virtually on November 2nd, 2021. The workshop features an outstanding keynote by epidemiologist Dr. Amira Roess and three paper presentations. You can join for the ACM SIGSPATIAL Conference and the workshop for free.
10/2021: I'm co-organizing the 1st ACM SIGSPATIAL International Workshop on Searching and Mining Large Collections of Geospatial Data (GeoSearch 2021) to be held virtually on November 2nd, 2021. We have an outstanding keynote by Manil Maskey (NASA) and four paper presentations.
10/2021: I'm co-organizing the 3rd ACM SIGSPATIAL International Workshop on Spatial Gems (SpatialGems 2021).
09/2021: Paper accepted at the 5th ACM SIGSPATIAL Workshop on Location-based Recommendations. Congratulations Samiul Islam for publishing your work!
08/2021 (Promotion & Tenure): I am now an Associate Professor with Tenure!
07/2021: Full paper accepted at SISAP 2021. Again, Congratulations @Ahmed Askar.
06/2021: Two papers accepted at SSTD 2021. Congratulations to my student Ahmed Askar for his first (full) paper!
05/2021: I am grateful for receiving a research grant ($2293K) from NSF on the project "Data-Driven Modeling to Improve Understanding of Human Behavior, Mobility, and Disease Spread".
We're looking for a motivated postdoc to work with us! (apply here)
04/2021: I'm co-organizing the 2nd ACM SIGSPATIAL International Workshop on Spatial Computing for Epidemiology (SpatialEpi’21) to be held on November 2nd in Beijing, China.
02/2021: I'm excited to be a mentor in GMUs Aspiring Scientists Summer Internship Program (ASSIP) through which I will mentor seven aspiring high school students in Summer 2021.
01/2021: I'm a guest editor for ACM Transactions on Spatial Algorithms and Systems Special Issue on Special Issue on Understanding the Spread of COVID-19.
12/2020: Our Dagstuhl Seminar Proposal on "Mobility Data Science" together with Dr. Mahmoud Sakr, Dr. Mohamed Mokbel, and Dr. Li Xiong has been accepted! Dates for the seminar will be announced soon.
12/2020: I'm grateful for having received a GMU Summer Team Impact Grant ($35K) to provide two graduate students and six undergraduate students with exciting summer research projects related to Data-Driven Analysis of Human Behavior in COVID-19 Simulation Models in Summer 2021.
12/2020: Joined the ACM SIGKDD 2021 Program Committee (Research Track)
11/2020: Joined the organizing committee of SSTD 2021 as Online Arrangements chair.
11/2020: Survey paper on Uncertain Spatial Data Management accepted to appear in the Springer Handbook of Big Geospatial Data. A preprint can be found here.
10/2020:
I'm co-organizing the 1st ACM SIGSPATIAL International Workshop on Modeling and Understanding the Spread of COVID-19 to be held on November 3rd, 2020. We have two outstanding keynotes (Dr. Nicholas Reich and Dr. Jeffrey Shaman) and 16 excellent paper presentations. To attend the workshop, you can register for ACM SIGSPATIAL Conference here.
10/2020:
I'm further co-organizing the 3rd ACM SIGSPATIAL International Workshop on GeoSpatial Simulation (GeoSim 2020) for the third time to be held on November 3rd, 2020. Please join us for a keynote by Dr. Samarth Swarup and eight excellent paper presentation. To attend the workshop, you can register for ACM SIGSPATIAL Conference here.
10/2020:
I'm co-organizing the 2nd ACM SIGSPATIAL International Workshop on Spatial Gems (SpatialGems 2020).
10/2020:
One paper accepted at the 3rd ACM SIGSPATIAL Workshop on Advances in Resilient and Intelligent Cities (ARIC 2020).
Congratulations to John Pesavento, Andy Chen, and Rayan Yu, three high school students who worked with us during GMU's Aspiring Scientists Program (ASSIP).
09/2020:
Published the latest issue of the ACM SIGSPATIAL Newsletter which is a special issue on Modeling and Understanding the Spread of COVID-19 (Part 2). All ACM SIGSPATIAL Newsletter articles can be found at https://www.sigspatial.org/publications/newsletter/
09/2020:
One full paper accepted at ACM SIGSPATIAL conference. Congratulations Liming Zhang!
08/2020:
Two full papers accepted at DSAA 2020!
08/2020:
4th Place Award and invited paper at the ACM KDD Prescriptive Analytics for the Physical World (PAPW 2020) EpiSim Challenge!
07/2020:
Best Paper Award Runner-Up at MDM 2020!
06/2020:
Two full papers accepted at MDM 2020!
06/2020:
Tutorial Accepted at MDM 2020!
