SMU Associate Professor of Information Systems Kyriakos Mouratidis aims to maximise the potential of databases to provide solutions to real-world problems. He is looking at voluminous data collections and ways to extract information from them efficiently. In particular, he works with spatial databases, in which data records have locations (geographic coordinates) associated with them. With these, users can make queries such as a nearest neighbour query. Associate Prof Mouratidis specialises in developing algorithms and data organisation methods that minimise the computational overhead to process multiple standing queries. He has developed efficient methods for the continuous monitoring of K-NNs according to the driving distance between queries and data points in the city’s road network. In addition to query and data movements, these algorithms can also handle network changes, such as varying traffic conditions.