Institution: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Email : kcchang@illinois.edu
Title: Querying and Manipulating Data across the Structural Divide for Exploiting Big Data
Abstract
While we are blessed with data in our digital civilization, our ability to exploit this abundance hinges on the challenges for handling both structured and unstructured data. The structural divide presents quite opposite challenges: Structured data is easy for machines to use with its rigorous syntax and precise semantics, but hard for humans to manipulate, and unstructured data is just the opposite. To exploit data everywhere and to incorporate humans with machines, we must bridge the structural divide between how data exists and how we query over it. I will present our efforts towards this objective of bridging the structural divide of data and querying in both ways. On the one hand, can we enable unstructured “direct manipulation” querying over structured data? The DataSpread system aims to enable natural interaction over databases in a spreadsheet interface, marrying the ease of use of spreadsheet with the scalability of database. On the other hand, can we enable structured “data aware” querying over unstructured data? The WISDM system aims at developing semantic-rich search– for entities and relationships– over unstructured documents. I will present the prototype systems and demonstrate the capabilities.
Bio.
Kevin C.C. Chang is a Professor in Computer Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he leads the FORWARD Data Lab for search, integration, and mining of data. He received a BS from National Taiwan University and PhD from Stanford University, in Electrical Engineering. His research addresses large scale information access, for search, mining, and integration across structured and unstructured big data, with current focuses on “entity-centric” Web search/mining and social media analytics. He received two Best Paper Selections in VLDB 2000 and 2013, an NSF CAREER Award in 2002, an NCSA Faculty Fellow Award in 2003, IBM Faculty Awards in 2004 and 2005, Academy for Entrepreneurial Leadership Faculty Fellow Award in 2008, and the Incomplete List of Excellent Teachers at University of Illinois in 2001, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2010, and 2011. He is passionate to bring research results to the real world and, with his students, co-founded Cazoodle, a startup from the University of Illinois, for deepening vertical “data-aware” search over the web.
