Research
Publications
Teaching
Service

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Zachary G. Ives

Assistant Professor
Computer & Information Science Department
University of Pennsylvania

Associated Faculty, Penn Center for Bioinformatics

Teaching CIS 555 in Spring 2008
Office hours for Spring 2008 semester: TBA

Research

My research interests lie in the areas of databases and distributed systems, especially as they relate to the Web, Web-scale information sharing, and distributed networks of devices (e.g., sensors, actuators). I am a member of the database, wireless/mobile systems, and systems research groups at Penn. I lead and participate in a number of projects that relate to these topics, focused on making it easier to exchange, locate, and analyze networked information.

• ORCHESTRA focuses on the problem of collaborative data sharing. Our goal is to support loose confederations of databases or data warehouses in which the members want to share information, although they have different schemas and different ideas of what is the "right" content. Perhaps each site is independently updating the contents of its database, often making corrections and amendments -- as commonly occurs in bioinformatics and other settings. The major challenge is how to -- in a peer-to-peer like system with no central control -- propagate and translate the updates from one participant to another and allow each site to override updates from elsewhere. Our goal is to support environments in which the local participant has complete control of his or her data and schema, but can import data from elsewhere in a "managed" fashion. Within this context, we are studying a number of problems relating to update translation and propagation, peer-to-peer system architectures, distributed update translation, and distributed query processing.
  
  
• SHARQ (Sharing Heterogeneous, Autonomous Resources and Queries) is a large-scale data sharing project focusing on bioinformatics. It leverages the core Orchestra engine, but also adds an intuitive user interface for rapidly authoring -- and altering -- queries, plus a portal (SHARQ Guide) that offers both keyword search and browse access to data sources, schemas, and queries.
  
  
• Aspen addresses the problem of programming and integrating large-scale and complex sensor networks. The system focuses on a setting in which large numbers of distributed sensors, with varying capabilities, must be coordinated in order to manage and reason about collections of physical entities and phenomena. My focus is on sensor integration, i.e., integration of data streams from multiple sensor (and other) sources. We are also interested in the impact of sensor networks on reasoning about security. See the wireless and mobile systems page here for more information.

Acknowledgments: My research is funded through grants from NSF (CAREER #IIS-0477972, SEIII #IIS-0513778, III #IIS-0713267, NOSS #CNS-0721541), DARPA (#HR0011-06-1-0016), Penn ISTAR, Lockheed Martin, and software donations from MarkLogic, Electric Software, and IBM Corp.

Teaching

Selected recent courses and seminars:

• Spring 2008: CIS 455/555, Internet and Web Systems.
• Fall 2007: CIS 550, Database Management Systems.
• Spring 2007: CIS 455/555, Internet and Web Systems.
• Spring 2006: CSE 455/CIS 555, Internet and Web Systems.
• Spring 2006: Systems lunch reading group. Fridays @ noon.
• Spring 2006: DB-IR-ML reading group. Wednesdays @ 2:30.
• Fall 2005: CIS 550, Database Management Systems.

Detailed information is here.

Publications

To appear:

• A Substrate for In-Network Sensor Data Integration, with Svilen Mihaylov, Marie Jacob, and Sudipto Guha. Accepted for publication, DMSN 2008.
• Learning to Create Data-Integrating Queries, with Partha Pratim Talukdar, Marie Jacob, M. Salman Mehmood, Koby Crammer, Fernando Pereira, and Sudipto Guha, to appear, VLDB 2008.
• Bidirectional Mappings for Data and Update Exchange, with Grigoris Karvounarakis, to appear, WebDB 2008.
• Invited entries on Adaptive stream processing, Updates in P2P systems, and XML publishing for the upcoming Encyclopedia of Database Systems, edited by Ling Liu and M. Tamer Ozsu, soon to be available from Springer.

Selected recent publications:

• Sideways Information Passing for Push-Style Query Processing, with Nicholas Taylor. ICDE 2008, Cancun, Mexico.
• DBpedia: a Nucleus for a Web of Open Data, with Soeren Auer, Christian Bizer, Georgi Kobilarov, Jens Lehmann, Richard Cyganiak. ISWC/ASWC In-Use Track, 2007.
• Adaptive Query Processing, with Amol Deshpande, Vijayshankar Raman. Tutorial, VLDB 2007. Slides
• Update Exchange with Mappings and Provenance, with Todd J. Green, Grigoris Karvounarakis, and Val Tannen. VLDB 2007.
• The Case for a Unified Extensible Data-centric Mobility Infrastructure, with Yun Mao, Boon Thau Loo, Jonathan M. Smith. MobiArch 2007.
• Adaptive Query Processing, with Amol Deshpande and Vijayshankar Raman. Foundations and Trends in Databases, Vol. 1 No. 1, 2007. Hardcopy available at a discount from Now Publishers; see here.
• ORCHESTRA: Facilitating Collaborative Data Sharing, with TJ Green, Nick Taylor, Grigoris Karvounarakis, Olivier Biton, Val Tannen. Demonstration description, SIGMOD 2007.
• Security in Sensor Networks: More Interesting than You Think, with Madhukar Anand, Eric Cronin, Micah Sherr, Matt Blaze, and Insup Lee. Usenix Workshop on Hot Topics in Security, 2006.
• Reconciling while Tolerating Disagreement in Collaborative Data Sharing, with Nick Taylor. SIGMOD 2006.
• Schema Mediation for Large-Scale Data Sharing, with Alon Halevy, Dan Suciu, Igor Tatarinov. VLDB Journal, Vol 14 No 1, March 2005.
• ORCHESTRA: Rapid, Collaborative Sharing of Dynamic Data, with Nitin Khandelwal, Aneesh Kapur, Murat Cakir. CIDR, January, 2005, Asilomar, CA.
• Adapting to Data Integration Source Properties, with Alon Halevy and Dan Weld. ACM SIGMOD Conference on Management of Data, June 2004, Paris, France.
• The Piazza Peer Data Management System, with Alon Halevy, Jayant Madhavan, Peter Mork, Dan Suciu, Igor Tatarinov. IEEE Transactions on Knowledge & Data Engineering, Vol 16 No 7, July 2004, 787-798.

A complete list is here.

PhD Student Collaborators

• Nick Taylor
• Svilen Mihaylov (with Sudipto Guha)
• TJ Green (with Val Tannen)
• Grigoris Karvounarakis (with Val Tannen)
• Mengmeng Liu (with Boon Thau Loo)
• Marie Jacob
• Partha Pratim Talukdar (with Fernando Pereira)

Frequent Faculty Collaborators

• Val Tannen, Penn CIS
• Insup Lee, Penn CIS
• Sudipto Guha, Penn CIS
• Matt Blaze, Penn CIS
• Fernando Pereira, Penn CIS
• Lyle Ungar, Penn CIS
• Boon Thau Loo, Penn CIS
• Chris Stoeckert, Penn Center for Bioinformatics
• Pete White, Children's Hospital of Philadelphia

A complete list of advisees is here.