Cyrus Shahabi is currently an Associate Professor and the Director of the Information Laboratory (InfoLAB) at the Computer Science Department and also a Research Area Director at the NSF's Integrated Media Systems Center (IMSC) at the University of Southern California. He received his B.S. in Computer Engineering from Sharif University of Technology in 1989 and then his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from the University of Southern California in May 1993 and August 1996, respectively. He has two books and more than hundred articles, book chapters, and conference papers in the areas of databases, GIS and multimedia. Dr. Shahabi's current research interests include Geospatial and Multidimensional Data Analysis, Peer-to-Peer Systems and Streaming Architectures. He is currently an associate editor of the IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems (TPDS) and on the editorial board of ACM Computers in Entertainment magazine. He is also a member of the steering committees of IEEE NetDB and the general co-chair of ACM GIS 2007 and 2008. He serves on many conference program committees such as VLDB 2008, ACM SIGKDD 2006 to 2007, IEEE ICDE 2006 and 2008, SSTD 2005 and 2007 and ACM SIGMOD 2004.

Dr. Shahabi is the recipient of the 2002 National Science Foundation CAREER Award and 2003 Presidential Early Career Awards for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE). In 2001, he also received an award from the Okawa Foundations.