Ablimit A. Keskin

CTO & Co-founder, Kouper

I build large-scale data-intensive systems with a decade-plus focused on healthcare data infrastructure and applied AI. My research background is in parallel database systems, spatial data management, and computational pathology.

Selected Honors

• VLDB Test of Time Award (2024) — for the 2013 paper Hadoop-GIS: A High Performance Spatial Data Warehousing System over MapReduce (co-authored).
• Best Poster, ACM SIGSPATIAL (2016) — Scalable 3D Spatial Queries for Analytical Pathology Imaging with MapReduce.
• Best Presentation, Pathology Informatics (2012) — MIGIS: a high-performance query system for pathology imaging analytics.

Professional Experience

CTO & Co-founder, Kouper, 2022 – present

• Co-founded Kouper to build the AI-native care navigation layer for healthcare

Engineering & Science, IONpath, 2021 – 2022

• Built data engineering and analytics infrastructure for multiplexed tissue imaging.

Data Engineering, Polarr, 2020 – 2021

• Developed data infrastructure supporting large-scale machine-learning workflows.

Engineering, Komodo Health, 2017 – 2020

• Early core technical member; led engineering teams building the longitudinal, patient-level data foundation that connects fragmented healthcare data into usable care journeys and powers Komodo's product lines.

Senior Research Scientist, Hewlett Packard Labs, Palo Alto, 2014 – 2017

• Built petabyte-scale systems on memory-driven compute architecture, including fast derivatives pricing.

Earlier: Research/Engineering internships at Yahoo! Search, Microsoft Research (Redmond), and Max-Planck Institute for Informatics.

Education

Ph.D., Computer Science, Emory University, 2014
M.S., Computer Science, Emory University, 2010
B.E., Computer Science, University of Science and Technology Beijing, 2006

Selected Publications

~1,400+ citations, h-index 14 — full list on Google Scholar.

• Hadoop-GIS: A High Performance Spatial Data Warehousing System over MapReduce, VLDB 2013 — Test of Time Award, 2024.
• SATO: a spatial data partitioning framework for scalable query processing, ACM SIGSPATIAL 2014.
• High performance spatial queries for spatial big data: from medical imaging to GIS, SIGSPATIAL Special 2015.

Academic Service

• PC Member: SIGSPATIAL 2014/2015/2016, SIGSPATIAL Ph.D. Symposium 2014, HealthGIS 2015
• Invited Journal Reviewer: IEEE TOBD, TODS, JCST, CMPB, IJGIS, CCPE
• Reviewer: SIGSPATIAL 2013, BigSpatial 2013, VLDB 2013/2014/2015, IEEE Big Data 2014