In the recent International Symposium on Spatial and Temporal Data (SSTD'23), one of the prominent venues for spatial research, two papers from UCR were selected among the meeting's top 5 papers that will also be invited for a special journal issue.

The paper titled "Viper: Interactive Exploration of Large Satellite Data" by Zhuocheng Shang and Ahmed Eldawy, proposes a new index and query processing method that allows data scientists to interactively explore large-scale satellite data. To ensure user interactivity, Viper produces the results progressively with a prioritization technique that improves the accuracy of early results.

The paper titled "Scalable Overlay Operations over DCEL Polygon Layers" by Andres Calderon, Vassilis J. Tsotras and Amr Magdy, proposes a distributed and scalable way to compute the overlay operation among two very large layers of complex polygons (with millions of edges) represented using the Doubly Connected Edge List (DCEL) structure. The approach can compute the overlay of very large real datasets (32M edges) in just a few minutes.