[Colloquium] Vagelis Hristidis on Tuesday, March 9, 2004

[Margery Ishmael]

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DEPARTMENT OF COMPUTER SCIENCE

Date: Tuesday, March 9, 2004
Time: 2:30 p.m.
Place: Ryerson 251

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Speaker:  VAGELIS HRISTIDIS, University of California, San Diego

Url: http://www.db.ucsd.edu/people/vagelis/

Title: Keyword Search in Structured and Semistructured Databases

Abstract:

Databases and Information Retrieval (IR) have followed distinct paths,
mainly due the fact that databases used to store only rigidly structured
data and handle rigidly structured queries, which serve the purposes of
well-designed applications. In contrast, IR is employed for information
discovery and primarily studies how (unstructured) documents are ranked
according to their relevance to an unstructured query (typically a set 
of
keywords).

However, due to the increasing availability of database data, the 
increasing
popularity of XML and the increasing amount of text stored in 
databases, it
has become imperative to allow unstructured queries on structured and
semi-structured databases, in addition to documents. The most popular 
type of
unstructured query is keyword queries, which eliminate the requirement 
of
knowing a query language and the structure of the database, and whose
success is proven by Web search engines. The main focus of this talk is
proximity keyword queries, which discover the associations between 
keywords
in a database (http://www.db.ucsd.edu/xkeyword/). In addition to that, 
we
briefly present how link-based ranking techniques (similar to PageRank) 
can
be applied to improve the quality of single-object results of keyword
queries (http://www.db.ucsd.edu/objectrank/).

Biography:

Vagelis Hristidis is a Ph.D. Candidate at the Computer Science and
Engineering Department at the University of California, San Diego. He is
expected to graduate in July 2004 under the supervision of Yannis
Papakonstantinou, and his area of expertise is Databases. In 
particular, his
thesis addresses the problem of bridging the gap between Databases and
Information Retrieval, by facilitating keyword-based queries in 
structured
and semistructured databases.

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Host: ANNE ROGERS

*Refreshments will follow the talk in Ryerson 255*

People in need of assistance should call 773-834-8977 in advance.