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We released open-source software Hadoop-GIS in 2011, and presented and published the work in VLDB 2013. This work initiated the development of a new spatial data analytical ecosystem characterized by its large-scale capacity in both computing and data storage, high scalability, compatibility with low-cost commodity processors in clusters and open-source software. After more than a decade of research and development, this ecosystem has matured and is now serving many applications across various fields. In this paper, we provide the background on why we started this project and give an overview of the original Hadoop-GIS software architecture, along with its unique technical contributions and legacy. We present the evolution of the ecosystem and its current state-of the-art, which has been influenced by the Hadoop-GIS project. We also describe the ongoing efforts to further enhance this ecosystem with hardware accelerations to meet the increasing demands for low latency and high throughput in various spatial data analysis tasks. Finally, we will summarize the insights gained and lessons learned over more than a decade in pursuing high-performance spatial data analytics. 

Introducing interpretability and reasoning into Multiple Instance Learning (MIL) methods for Whole Slide Image (WSI) analysis is challenging given the complexity of gigapixel slides. Traditionally MIL interpretability is limited to identifying salient regions deemed pertinent for downstream tasks offering little insight to the end-user (pathologist) regarding the rationale behind these selections. To address this we propose Self-Interpretable MIL (SI-MIL) a method intrinsically designed for interpretability from the very outset. SI-MIL employs a deep MIL framework to guide an interpretable branch grounded on handcrafted pathological features facilitating linear predictions. Beyond identifying salient regions SI-MIL uniquely provides feature-level interpretations rooted in pathological insights for WSIs. Notably SI-MIL with its linear prediction constraints challenges the prevalent myth of an inevitable trade-off between model interpretability and performance demonstrating competitive results compared to state-of-the-art methods on WSI-level prediction tasks across three cancer types. In addition we thoroughly benchmark the local- and global-interpretability of SI-MIL in terms of statistical analysis a domain expert study and desiderata of interpretability namely user-friendliness and faithfulness. 

In digital pathology, the spatial context of cells is important for cell classification, cancer diagnosis and prognosis. To model such complex cell context, however, is challenging. Cells form different mixtures, lineages, clusters and holes. To model such structural patterns in a learnable fashion, we introduce several mathematical tools from spatial statistics and topological data analysis. We incorporate such structural descriptors into a deep generative model as both conditional inputs and a differentiable loss. This way, we are able to generate high quality multi-class cell layouts for the first time. We show that the topology-rich cell layouts can be used for data augmentation and improve the performance of downstream tasks such as cell classification. 

Multiplex Immunohistochemistry (mIHC) is a cost-effective and accessible method for in situ labeling of multiple protein biomarkers in a tissue sample. By assigning a different stain to each biomarker, it allows the visualization of different types of cells within the tumor vicinity for downstream analysis. However, to detect different types of stains in a given mIHC image is a challenging problem, especially when the number of stains is high. Previous deep-learning-based methods mostly assume full supervision; yet the annotation can be costly. In this paper, we propose a novel unsupervised stain decomposition method to detect different stains simultaneously. Our method does not require any supervision, except for color samples of different stains. A main technical challenge is that the problem is underdetermined and can have multiple solutions. To conquer this issue, we propose a novel inversion regulation technique, which eliminates most undesirable solutions. On a 7-plexed IHC images dataset, the proposed method achieves high quality stain decomposition results without human annotation.