[jeffery@CS.Berkeley.EDU: DB Seminar, Sept 29th: Ihab Ilyas]

----- Forwarded message from Shawn Jeffery <jeffery(at)CS(dot)Berkeley(dot)EDU> -----

From: Shawn Jeffery <jeffery(at)CS(dot)Berkeley(dot)EDU>
To: dblunch(at)triplerock(dot)CS(dot)Berkeley(dot)EDU
Subject: DB Seminar, Sept 29th: Ihab Ilyas

New Directions in Database Research Seminar Series
(http://db.cs.berkeley.edu/dbseminar.php)

Friday, September 29th, 2006
380 Soda Hall
1-2:30pm

Speaker:
Ihab Ilyas

Title:
The RankDB Project: Supporting Ranking In Database Systems

Abstract:
Ranking queries (also referred to as top-k queries) produce results
that are ordered on some computed score and provide the user with the
k most important results. Top-k queries are dominant in applications
such as multimedia databases, information retrieval, web databases and
middleware. Although ranking queries become a crucial part of many
emerging applications, current relational query processors handle this
type of queries neither natively nor efficiently.

In this talk, I will give an overview of the RankDB project at
Waterloo. RankDB focuses on supporting ranking in relational database
systems by treating ranking predicates as first class constructs. I¹ll
focus on a recent piece of work, where we show how to answer ad-hoc
ranking aggregates queries (top-k groups) efficiently in relational
engines. I will also highlight our ongoing efforts in defining and
supporting top-k queries in the context of uncertain and probabilistic
databases.

Bio:
Ihab Ilyas is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the
University of Waterloo since July 2004. He got his Ph.D. in 2004 from
Purdue University, West Lafayette. He is currently an IBM CAS faculty
fellow since January 2006. His main research is in the area of
database systems with a focus on query processing in non-traditional
environments. His research interests include top-k and rank-aware
query processing, adaptive query processing, managing uncertain and
probabilistic databases, self-managing databases, indexing techniques,
and spatial databases. For more information, please visit
http://www.cs.uwaterloo.ca/~ilyas

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