Chang-Tien Lu is a professor in the Department of Computer Science and associate director of the Discovery Analytics Center at Virginia Tech. He served as secretary (2008-2011) and vice chair (2011-2014) of the ACM Special Interest Group on Spatial Information (ACM SIGSPATIAL).
His research on data management is to fulfill emerging requirements for storing, analyzing, and visualizing spatial data. His ongoing projects range from explorations of fundamental access and retrieval issues to practical applications that deal with data analysis and knowledge discovery tasks. These projects have led to the publication of numerous high-quality research papers and the production of innovative prototype systems. They are also helping professionals in many fields to react quickly and make effective decisions in time-sensitive applications. His major contributions include efficient mining algorithms and sophisticated storage structures that can be scaled up to process large scale data, as well as the formalization of spatial patterns and trends.