[Colloquium] Tyler Skluzacek Dissertation Defense/May 20, 2022

[Megan Woodward]

This is an announcement of Tyler Skluzacek's Dissertation Defense.
===============================================
Candidate: Tyler Skluzacek

Date: Friday, May 20, 2022

Time: 10:30 am CST

Remote Location: https://zoom.us/j/96049739931?pwd=TWszL08rRWpjY2xISlN1ZU9aNEozUT09  Meeting ID: 960 4973 9931 Passcode: 8EL1yQ

Location: JCL 011

Title: AUTOMATED METADATA EXTRACTION CAN MAKE DATA SWAMPS MORE NAVIGABLE

Abstract: In a science utopia, every research repository would be accompanied by a database of rich, searchable metadata that users can quickly and confidently query to discover, retrieve, and organize the many artifacts of research workflows. In practice, science is far from this utopia; repositories commonly decay into disorganized data swamps that overwhelm scientists and result in crucial research data being inaccessible to those who could make use of them. To dredge data swamps, I describe an automated metadata extraction system for science—Xtract—that crawls large repositories, dynamically constructs extraction workflows by intelligently mapping extractors to diverse file types, scalably executes these workflows on distributed research cyberinfrastructure, and publishes the contents into a search index. I show via a user study that an Xtract-generated search index drastically increases the speed and confidence with which researchers navigate their science collections. Finally, I highlight the benefits of this approach by applying Xtract to real-world repositories collectively spanning over 6 million files and 1PB of data across materials science, climate science, battery modeling, and spectroscopy repositories.

Advisors: Kyle Chard and Ian Foster

Committee Members: Ian Foster, Kyle Chard, Michael Franklin, and Raul Castro Fernandez