Computer Science Colloquium

Post date: Feb 11, 2012 7:30:2 PM

Querying and Online Analytical Processing of Large-scale Information Networks  

Monday, Feburary 13, 2012, 4:00 p.m., Davis Marksbury Theater

Dr. Peixiang Zhao

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign 

Social and technical information systems usually consist of a large number of interacting physical, conceptual, and human/societal entities.

Such individual entities are interconnected to form large and sophisticated networks, which, without loss of generality, are often referred to as information networks. Noteworthy examples of information networks include communication networks, research collaboration networks, biological networks, social networks and ultimately, the Web. Information networks are ubiquitous and have formed a critical component of modern information infrastructure.

In this talk, I will discuss a series of fundamental queries of practical value arising in real world information networks, and explore the corresponding effective and scalable query processing solutions in the case of large-scale information networks. I will be mainly focused on two pieces of my recent work. SPath is a high performance graph indexing mechanism to address the general sub-graph queries in large information networks. Graph Cube is the first of its kind warehousing and online analytical processing (OLAP) tool for multidimensional information networks.

In Graph Cube, we jointly considered both the multidimensional metadata together with the graph structure of information networks for query processing, thus generating a set of structure-enriched and concisely summarized aggregate networks as query results. It has been widely believed that the marriage of information network analytics and query processing technology will bring many exciting opportunities for future study, and I will briefly mention some of the promising research topics within and beyond this direction as well in the talk.

Refreshments Served 

Biography

Peixiang Zhao is the 5th year Ph.D. student in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). He is affiliated with the Data Mining Research Group and the Data and Information Systems (DAIS) Laboratory at UIUC. His advisor is Prof. Jiawei Han. 

Peixiang's research interest lies in database systems, data mining and data-intensive computation and analytics in general. More specifically, he has been focused on the problems in modeling, querying and mining graph-structured data, such as large-scale graph databases and information networks, which have been witnessed extremely popular and flourishing in a wide spectrum of application domains, such as bioinformatics, computer systems, business processes and the Web. Peixiang got his B.S. and M.S.

degree from the Department of Computer Science and Technology at Peking University in 2001 and 2004, respectively. Between 2004 and 2007, he was a Ph.D. student in the Department of Systems Engineering and Engineering Management at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. For more detailed information, please visit his homepage at http://www.cs.uiuc.edu/homes/pzhao4/

or contact him via pzhao4@illinois.edu.