Interactive Data Analytics and Exploration on Big Data

Speaker: Feifei Li, University of Utah

Time: 10:00-11:00 a.m., Nov. 19, 2014

Venue: Meeting room 202, Second Floor, Office Building, Software Campus

Host: Xiaohui Yu

Abstract: How to store, process, and analyze large heterogeneous data with a variety of feature dimensions, including for example one spatial and/or a temporal dimension(s), is a fundamental challenge. The existing practice for processing such large heterogeneous data is to develop a customized query and analytical engine for each new type of data or new source of data, which is not sustainable continuing forward.

We want to dramatically simplify the management and analysis of such large data. We use the concept of online aggregation/analytics and maintain a robust, effective, and efficient summary layer to achieve our objectives. Our summary layer satisfies two key properties: they are both interactive and mergeable. Our goal is to give quick and continuous query/analytical results from the start of the query/task execution, while providing quality guarantees and refining the accuracy of such results throughout the query execution. The STORM system addresses the key challenges in realizing the above goals. We will do a short demo of the system in the end of the talk.

Short Bio: Feifei Li is an associate professor at the School of Computing, University of Utah. He obtained his B.S. in computer engineering from NanyangTechnological University, Singapore in 2002 (transferred from Tsinghua University, China) and PhD in computer science from Boston University in 2007. His research focuses on the scalability, efficiency, and effectiveness issues, as well as security problems, in database systems and big data management. He was a recipient for an NSF career award in 2011, two HP IRP awards in 2011 and 2012 respectively, a Google App Engine award, the IEEE ICDE best paper award in 2004, and the IEEE ICDE 10+ Years Most Influential Paper Award in 2014. He is/was the demo chair for VLDB 2014, general chair for SIGMOD 2014, PC area chair for ICDE 2014 and SIGMOD 2015, and associate editor for IEEE TKDE, and in addition has played various leadership roles in the database and data management community. He is currently the PI or co-PI for 6 different NSF projects for over 6 million US dollars, and in particular he is the PI for two NSF projects on big data systems and foundations for over 2 million US dollars.