Seminars by Julia Stoyanovich and Benny Kimelfeld at Télécom ParisTech (21 January 2016)

Julia Stoyanovich (Drexel University) and Benny Kimelfeld (Technion) will give talks on 21 January 2016 at Télécom ParisTech, 46 rue Barrault, Paris, 14:00 in Amphi Saphir.

Portal: A query language for evolving graphs

Julia Stoyanovich, Drexel University, Philadelphia, PA, U.S.A.

Graphs are used to represent a plethora of phenomena, from the Web and social networks, to biological pathways, to semantic knowledge bases. Arguably the most interesting and important questions one can ask about graphs have to do with their evolution. Which Web pages are showing an increasing popularity trend? How does influence propagate in social networks? How does knowledge evolve? In this talk I will present Portal, a declarative language for efficient querying and exploratory analysis of evolving graphs. I will describe an implementation of Portal in scope of Apache Spark, an open-source distributed

data processing framework, and will demonstrate that careful engineering can lead to good performance. Finally, I will describe our work on a visual query composer for Portal.

Julia Stoyanovich is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the College of Computing and Informatics at Drexel University (Philadelphia, USA). Prior to joining Drexel, she was a Postdoctoral researcher and an NSF/CRA Computing Innovations Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania. Julia received her MS and PhD degrees in Computer Science at Columbia University (New York, USA) in 2003 and 2009, respectively, and her BS in Computer Science and in Mathematics and Statistics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, USA in 1998. Having graduated from college, Julia spent 5 years in the start-up industry, as a software developer, data architect and database administrator. This experience has motivated her to work with real datasets whenever possible, and to deliver results of her research to the communities of target users, as part of open-source systems or as stand-alone prototypes. Julia's research is in the area of data and knowledge management. Her focus is on developing novel information discovery approaches, with the goal of helping the user identify relevant information, and ultimately transform that information into knowledge. She has recently worked with a wide variety of real datasets, from shopping, dating and collaborative tagging applications, to full-genome association studies and gene expression microarrays, to data-intensive workflows and scientific articles. For more information, see https://www.cs.drexel.edu/~julia/

Database Principles in the Wild

Benny Kimelfeld, Technion, Haifa, Israel

 

Modern technological and social trends, such as mobile computing, blogging, and social networking, produce an enormous amount of often valuable data. At the same time, the means to analyze such data are becoming more accessible with the popularity of business models like cloud computing, open source and crowd sourcing. But such data pose challenges to traditional database paradigms. Due to the uncontrolled nature by which data is produced, much of it is free text, often in informal natural language, leading to computing environments with high levels of uncertainty and error. In this talk I will describe principled research that I have been pursuing towards systems that facilitate modern data-centric development by unifying key functionalities of databases, text analytics, machine learning and artificial intelligence.

Benny Kimelfeld is an Associate Professor in the Computer Science Faculty at Technion, Israel. After receiving his Ph.D. from The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, he has been a Research Staff Member at IBM Research Almaden, and a Computer Scientist at LogicBlox. Benny's research spans a spectrum of both foundational and systems aspects of data management, such as probabilistic and inconsistent databases, information retrieval over structured data, and infrastructure for text analytics. Benny was an invited tutorial speaker at PODS 2014 and a co-chair of the first SIGMOD/PODS workshop on Big Uncertain Data (BUDA). He is a co-chair of the 2016 Web and Databases Workshop (WebDB'16), and he currently serves as an associate editor in the Journal of Computer and System Sciences (JCSS). enny is a Taub Fellow at Technion, and his research is funded by the Israel Science Foundation (ISF), the United States - Israel Binational Science Foundation (BSF), and DARPA. For more information, see http://www.cs.technion.ac.il/people/bennyk/