The paper “A Parallel and Distributed Approach for Diversified Top-k Best Region Search”, by Hamid Shahrivari, Matthaios Olma, Odysseas Papapetrou, Dimitrios Skoutas and Anastasia Ailamaki, has been accepted as a full research paper in EDBT 2020 and will be presented at the conference, taking place during 30th March – 2nd April, 2020, in Copenhagen, Denmark.

Given a set of points in a two-dimensional space, the Best Region Search problem finds the optimal placement of a rectangle of a specified size such that the value of a user-defined scoring function over its enclosed points is maximized. This problem has numerous applications in business intelligence and decision making related to location planning. In this paper, we propose and evaluate different parallel and distributed algorithms that enable the scalable computation of top-k, diversified results.

This paper is joint work by Eindhoven University of Technology, EPFL and Athena R.C., and has been funded by the SmartDataLake project.