Prior to joining UI, he received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Minnesota in June 2014. His general research interests are data mining and data management, with an emphasis on spatio-temporal big data analytics and mining, spatial database and Geographic Information Systems (GIS). Xun’s work has been recognized with best paper awards at international conferences and workshops such as BigSpatial’13 and SSTD’11. Xun served as program committee members in SSTDM’14, ACM SIGSPATIAL PhD Symposium’14. He also served as a reviewer for conferences and journals including IEEE TKDE, Geoinformatica, ACM KDD, IEEE ICDM, ACM SIGSPATIAL.