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Zachary G. Ives

Associate Professor and Markowitz Faculty Fellow
Computer & Information Science Department
University of Pennsylvania

Associated Faculty, Penn Center for Bioinformatics
Distinguished Research Fellow, Annenberg Center for Public Policy
Undergraduate Chair, Singh Program in Market & Social Systems Engineering

Teaching CIS 550 in Fall 2011
Office hours: Tuesdays 1:30-2:30

 

Contact Information

576 Levine Hall North
Computer and Information Science Department
University of Pennsylvania
3330 Walnut Street
Philadelphia, PA 19104-6389
zives@cis.upenn.edu
(215) 746-2789    Fax: (215) 898-0587

Biographical Sketch

Zachary Ives is an Associate Professor and the Markowitz Faculty Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania, and an Associated Faculty Member of the Penn Center for Bioinformatics. He received his B.S. from Sonoma State University and his PhD from the University of Washington. His research interests include data integration, data sharing among autonomous and heterogeneous systems, heterogeneous sensor networks, and information provenance and authoritativeness. He is a recipient of the NSF CAREER award, an alumnus of the DARPA Computer Science Study Panel, and a member of DARPA's Information Science and Technology advisory panel.  He has been a co-program chair for the XSym, NTII, and WebDB workshops, and an Area Vice-Chair for ICDE. He is the recipient of the Christian R. and Mary F. Lindback Foundation Award for Distinguished Teaching. He serves as the undergraduate curriculum chair for Penn's new Singh Program in Market and Social Systems Engineering.

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. My research projects relate to making it easier to exchange, locate, and analyze networked information.

  • ORCHESTRA focuses on the problem of collaborative data sharing:  exchanging data and updates among loose confederations of databases, when the different database owners have different schemas and different ideas of what is the "right" content. We have developed techniques to map data and updates among different sites, maintain data provenance, and use the data provenance as the basis of assessing trust and ultimately to resolve conflicts.  We specifically target biological data sharing applications.  See here for an overview paper. Funded by NSF CAREER #IIS-0477972.
  • The Q query system addresses the challenges of querying in a system like Orchestra, when one does not know apriori where to find the most relevant data.  Q takes as input a keyword query, which it matches against schema elements to produce potential data integration queries.  The system returns answers from the most promising queries and takes user feedback on the results.  This feedback is used to learn which sources are most relevant to the information need that motivated the query.  Funded by NSF CAREER #IIS-0477972 and SEIII #IIS-0513778.
  • 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 data integration, i.e., integration of data streams from multiple sensor (and other) sources. A target application is data center monitoring for energy, temperature, load, and other factors. Different aspects of the research are funded by NSF III #IIS-0713267, NOSS #CNS-0721541, and a University Research Initiative grant from Lockheed Martin.
  • The new Concerto system builds upon the ideas of Q and ORCHESTRA to build a network of interlinked data sources and "live ranked views." More details will be forthcoming shortly. Funded in part by IIS-1050448.
  • The IEEG Web Portal, in collaboration with Prof. Brian Litt of Bioengineering and Neurology, and Prof. Greg Worrell at Mayo Clinic, seeks to enable cloud-hosted science for epileptic seizure prediction (and beyond). IEEG also serves as a testbed for our data integration research.

 

Acknowledgments: I have also received grants from DARPA CSSG (#HRO011-06-1-0016 and HRO1107-1-0029), Penn ISTAR, the State of Pennsylvania, Amazon, and Lockheed Martin, and software donations from MarkLogic, Electric Software, and IBM Corp.

Teaching

I am now the Undergraduate Curriculum Chair for Penn's new Singh Program on Market and Social Systems Engineering, which officially admits its first class for Fall 2011. However, some of the courses have already been launched or are in progress: for Fall 2010 we launched MKSE 212 "Scalable and Cloud Computing" and in Spring 2011 we are launching MKSE 150 "Market and Social Systems on the Internet".

Selected recent courses and seminars:

Detailed information is here.

Publications

To appear / accepted for publication:

Selected recent publications:

A complete list is here.

Current PhD and MS Research Advisees

Graduated Students

  • Dr. Nicholas Taylor. Software Engineer, Google, Inc.
  • Dr. Partha Pratim Talukdar (with Fernando Pereira and Mark Liberman). Visiting Scientist, Microsoft Search Labs.
  • Dr. Todd J. Green (with Val Tannen). Assistant Professor at University of California-Davis.
  • Dr. Grigoris Karvounarakis (with Val Tannen). Computer Scientist, LogicBlox, Inc.

Frequent Collaborators

Tips on Interviewing

Finishing your PhD and going on the job market? I have previously compiled a list of reverences on interviewing, which you can find here.
Last modified: Sat Feb 6 19:32:31 EST 2010