Recent Progress on Selected Topics in Database Research ——-A Report by Nine Young Chinese Researchers Working in the United States

The study on database technologies, or more generally, the technologies of data and information management, is an important and active research field. Recently, many exciting results have been reported. In this fast growing field, Chinese researchers play more and more active roles. Research papers from Chinese scholars, both in China and abroad,appear in prestigious academic forums.In this paper,we, nine young Chinese researchers working in the United States, present concise surveys and report our recent progress on the selected fields that we are working on.Although the paper covers only a small number of topics and the selection of the topics is far from balanced, we hope that such an effort would attract more and more researchers,especially those in China,to enter the frontiers of database research and promote collaborations. For the obvious reason, the authors are listed alphabetically, while the sections are arranged in the order of the author list.

Recent progress on selected topics in database research — A report by nine young Chinese researchers working in the United States

The study on database technologies, or more generally, the technologies of data and information management, is an important and active research field. Recently, many exciting results have been reported. In this fast growing field, Chinese researchers play more and more active roles. Research papers from Chinese scholars, both in China and abroad, appear in prestigious academic forums. In this paper, we, nine young Chinese researchers working in the United States, present concise surveys and report our recent progress on the selected fields that we are working on. Although the paper covers only a small number of topics and the selection of the topics is far from balanced, we hope that such an effort would attract more and more researchers, especially those in China, to enter the frontiers of database research and promote collaborations. For the obvious reason, the authors are listed alphabetically, while the sections are arranged in the order of the author list. Zhiyuan Chen is currently a post-doctoral researcher at Microsoft Research, Redmond, WA. He received his B.S. (1995) and M.S. (1997) degrees from Fudan University, China. From 1997 to 2002, he was a graduate student at Cornell University under the guidance of Prof. Johanues Gehrke and Praveen Seshadri. He received his Ph.D. degree in August, 2002. His research interests include automatic database tuning and administration, database compression, selectivity estimation, and XML indexing. Chen Li is an assistant professor in the School of Information and Computer Science at the University of California, Irvine. He received his Ph.D. degree in computer science from Stanford University in 2001, and his B.S. degree in computer science from Tsinghua University, China. His research interests are in the fields of database and information systems, including data integration, data warehouses, data cleansing, multimedia databases, and XML. Jian Pei received the B.Eng and the M.Eng degrees, both in computer science, from Shanghai Jiaotong University, China, in 1991 and 1993, respectively, and the Ph.D. degree in Computing Science from Simon Fraser University, Canada, in 2002. He was a Ph.D. candidate in Peking University in 1997–1999. He is currently an Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Engineering, the State University of New York at Buffalo, USA. His research interests include data mining, data warehousing, online analytical processing, database systems, and bio-informatics. He is a member of the editorial board of the ACM SIGMOD Digital Symposium Collection (DiSC) and a guest editor of Journal of Computer Science and Technology. He has served in the program committees of international conferences and workshops, and has been a reviewer for some leading academic journals in his fields. He is a member of the ACM, the ACM SIGMOD, the ACM SIGKDD and the IEEE Computer Society, and a professional member of the ASEE. He is the Chair of the East Coast Regional Chapter of ACM SIGKDD. Yufei Tao became a research associate in Department of Computer Science, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, after obtaining his Ph.D. degree from the same dapartment in July 2002. Currently he is a visiting scientist at the CS Department of Carnegie Mellon University, USA. His research mainly focuses on the development of efficient query algorithms in spatio-temporal databases, as well as the application of related techniques to other areas such as temporal, spatial databases, and data warehouses. He has been awarded the Hong Kong Young Scientist Award 2002 (in physical and mathematical science) by the Hong Kong Institution of Science (HKIS) for his work on spatio-temporal data. Haixun Wang received his Ph.D. degree in computer science from UCLA in 2000. He also holds the B.S. degree in computer science and the M.S. degree in computer science from Shanghai Jiao Tong University. In 2000, he joined IBM T. J. Watson Research Center as a research staff member. His research interests include data mining, machine learning, database language and systems, bioinformatics, and XML. Wei Wang received the M.S. degree from the State University of New York at Binghamton in 1995 and the Ph.D. degree in computer science from the University of California at Los Angeles in 1999. She is currently an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her research interests include data mining, database systems and bioinformatics. She is the member of the editorial board of the Journal of Data Management and has published more than 50 research papers in international journals and referred conference proceedings. Jiong Yang is currently a visiting assistant professor at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His Current research interests include data mining, data integration, bio-informatics, mobile computing, and sensor networks. Dr. Yang received the B.S. degree from the University of California at Berkeley at 1994, the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in computer science from the University of California, Los Angeles in 1996 and 1999, respectively. He is the author of more than forty research papers. Jun Yang is an assistant professor of computer science at Duke University. Jun received his Ph.D. degree in computer science from Stanford University in the area of data warehousing. He is broadly interested in database and information management, with special emphasis on the management of derived data. He received his B.A. in computer science from University of California at Berkeley. Donghui Zhang's primary research area is database systems. He has been doing researches on temporal, spatial and spatio-temporal database indexing, aggregation queries and join processing; efficiently storing and querying XML documents which evolve over time. His current research interests include data streams, indexing and querying moving objects, image database processing, biological data processing. Prof. Zhang earned his Ph.D. degree from University of California, Riverside in August 2002. His dissertation title is “Aggregation Computation over Complex Objects”, in which he addressed the problem of computing aggregates over a large set of temporal and spatial objects. He proposed algorithms to compute such queries in logarithmic time, while previous approaches have linear performance.