Wherobots’ founders receive prestigious “ACM SIGSPATIAL 10-Year Impact Award”

Wherobots Senior Machine Learning Engineer is also nominated for an ACM Best Paper

SAN FRANCISCO, CA / ACCESS Newswire / November 12, 2025 / Wherobots today announced that the ACM Special Interest Group on Spatial Information has awarded a paper co-authored by the company’s founders – Mo Sarwat and Jia Yu – with its “ACM SIGSPATIAL 10-Year Impact Award.” The paper, “A Cluster Computing Framework for Processing Large-Scale Spatial Data,” is the foundation for Apache Sedona, an open source project introduced by Mo and Jia, which has been downloaded more than 62 million times by developers and engineers for a myriad of spatial use cases and applications.

Mo and Jia were named winners of the award at the ACM SIGSPATIAL annual conference, which serves as the central venue where foundational ideas in spatial databases and spatial analytics are first introduced. The conference attracts leading researchers and practitioners from academia, industry, and government agencies, providing a unified platform for advances spanning from geographic information systems to large-scale spatial AI. Many landmark papers that have shaped modern spatial computing were first published at SIGSPATIAL, establishing new subfields and technologies that continue to influence both academia and industry today.

“I know I speak for Jia as well when I say we are deeply honored to receive this award,” stated Sarwat. “The 10-Year Impact awards are major milestones within our industry because they recognize research that has withstood a decade of technological evolution and continue to shape how spatial data is processed and developed.”

Additionally, Isaac Corley, a Senior Machine Learning Engineer at Wherobots and a core contributor to the TorchGeo project, was one of a group of authors nominated for a Best Paper. The paper, “HydroChronos:Forecasting decades of surface water change,” introduced HydroChronos, a large-scale, multi-modal spatiotemporal dataset for surface water dynamics forecasting. It can be used for understanding long-term surface water changes using satellite, elevation and climate data, enabling deployment in water-resource planning, climate adaptation, early flood and drought warnings, and sustainable management of aquatic ecosystems.

In 2022, Sarwat and Yu founded Wherobots, which provides a highly scalable compute engine that enables data teams to accelerate data operations at planetary scale within a modern lakehouse architecture. Today, Apache Sedona and Wherobots are used by some of the most forward thinking companies to optimize their products in the realities of the physical world and stay ahead of an evolving planet including Amazon, Allstate, Uber, T-Mobile, Zillow, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and Land O’ Lakes.

About Wherobots

Wherobots, the Spatial Intelligence Cloud, enables data teams to innovate with data about the physical world faster, with higher scale, and at lower cost compared to existing solutions. Built by the creators of Apache Sedona, Wherobots provides a lakehouse engine that unifies spatial and non-spatial data, automates data workflows, and runs AI on planetary scale imagery. Spatial data refers to information about places, objects, or activities. Examples include GPS points and tracks, routes, land, road, parcel, crop, and building data, as well as imagery from drones and satellites. This data is fundamental to various industries including mobility, ag-tech, insurance, energy, telecommunications, retail, and logistics. In one solution, Wherobots handles these diverse spatial data types and formats, with customers seeing workloads running 5-20x faster and at lower cost than with other cloud data platforms. For more information, visit www.wherobots.com.

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