Gerard Salton
Lecture Series

Thursday, February 2, 2006
4:15 pm
B17 Upson Hall


Raghu Ramakrishnan
University of Wisconsin-Madison

Discovering Interesting Subsets of Data in Cube Space


Data Cubes have been widely studied and implemented, and so we researchers shouldn't be thinking about them anymore, right? Wrong. In this talk, I'll try to convince you that the multidimensional model  of data ("cube" sounds so much cooler) provides the right perspective for addressing many challenging tasks, including dealing with imprecision, mining for interesting subsets of data, analysis of historical stream data, and world peace. The talk will touch upon results from a couple of VLDB 2005 papers, and some recent ongoing work.

Bio:

Raghu Ramakrishnan is Professor of Computer Sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and was founder and CTO of QUIQ, a company that pioneered collaborative customer support (acquired by Kanisa). His research is in the area of database systems, with a focus on data retrieval, analysis, and mining. He and his group have developed scalable algorithms for clustering, decision-tree construction, and itemset counting, and were among the first to investigate mining of continuously evolving, stream data. His work on query optimization and deductive databases has found its way into several commercial database systems, and his work on extending SQL to deal with queries over sequences has influenced the design of window functions in SQL:1999. His paper on the Birch algorithm for scalable clustering is the 3rd most widely cited database publication over the past decade, according to a recent study by Rahm and Thor, and he has written the widely-used text "Database Management Systems" (WCB/McGraw-Hill, with J. Gehrke), now in its third edition.

He is Chair of ACM SIGMOD, on the Board of Directors of ACM SIGKDD and the Board of Trustees of the VLDB Endowment, an associate editor of ACM Transactions on Database Systems, and was previously editor-in-chief of the Journal of Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery and the Database area editor of the Journal of Logic Programming. Dr. Ramakrishnan is a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), and has received several awards, including a Packard Foundation Fellowship, an NSF Presidential Young Investigator Award, and an ACM SIGMOD Contributions Award, and was selected as a Vilas Associate by the University of Wisconsin in 1999.