WPI-Architecture

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Time: Thursdays 12-1pm
Place: Beckett Conference Room, Fuller Labs 246
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Computer Science Department
Worcester Polytechnic Institute
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News

On April 20th 2018, Yizhou Yan successfully passed her PhD Dissertation Proposal "Contextual Outlier Detection from Heterogeneous Data Sources". Congratulations to Yizhou on achieving this important milestone. Her dissertation committee members are Prof. Elke Rundensteiner (WPI, Advisor), Prof. Mohamed Y. Eltabakh (WPI), Prof. Xiangnan Kong (WPI), and Prof. Sam Madden (MIT).
On April 11th 2018, Xiao Qin successfully passed his PhD Dissertation Proposal "Sequential Data Mining and its Applications to Pharmacovigilance". Congratulations to Xiao on achieving this important milestone. His dissertation committee members are Prof. Elke Rundensteiner (WPI, Advisor), Prof. Xiangnan Kong (WPI), Prof. Mohamed Y. Eltabakh (WPI), and Prof. Fei Wang (Cornell Univeristy).
On March 22nd 2018, Maryam Hasan successfully passed her PhD Dissertation Proposal "Emotion Classification in Social Text Streams". Congratulations to Maryam on achieving this important milestone. Her dissertation committee members are Prof. Elke Rundensteiner (WPI, Advisor), Prof. Kyumin Lee (WPI), Prof. Emmanuel Agu (WPI), and Prof. Wei Ding (UMass Boston).
On December 8th 2017, Ramoza Ahsan successfully passed her PhD Dissertation Proposal "Exploration and Mining of Temporal Data". Congratulations to Ramoza on achieving this important milestone. Her dissertation committee members are Prof. Elke Rundensteiner (WPI, Advisor), Prof. Gabor Sarkozy (WPI, Advisor), Prof. Xiangnan Kong (WPI), and Prof. Vassilis Athitsos (The University of Texas at Arlington).
On November 27th 2017, Olga Poppe successfully defended her PhD dissertation. Congratulations to Dr. Olga Poppe! Olga's dissertation research, titled "Event Stream Analytics", focuses on strategies for scaling analytics including trend discovery and aggregation on event streams. Her dissertation committee members are Prof. Elke Rundensteiner (WPI, Advisor), Prof. Mohamed Eltabakh(WPI), Prof. Dan Dougherty (WPI), and Prof. D. Mailera (Portland State University).
On May 11th 2017, Phd student Cansu Sen has successfully passed her Ph.D. Research Qualifier. Congratulations to Cansu on achieving this important milestone!
On May 9th 2017, Phd student Caitlin Kuhlman has successfully passed her Ph.D. Research Qualifier. Congratulations to Caitlin on achieving this important milestone!
On April 12th 2017, Rodica Neamtu successfully defended her PhD dissertation. Congratulations to Dr. Rodica Neamtu! Rodica's dissertation entitled "Interactive Exploration of Time Series Powered by Time Warped Distances" falls into the broad areas of data analytics. Her dissertation committee members are Prof. Elke Rundensteiner (WPI, Advisor), Prof. Gabor Sarkozy (WPI, Advisor), Prof. George Heineman (WPI), and Prof. Sam Madden (MIT).
On March 9th 2017, Phd student Yizhou Yan has successfully passed her Ph.D. Research Qualifier. Congratulations to Yizhou on achieving this important milestone!
On January 29th 2017, Phd student Olga Poppe has successfully passed her Ph.D. Comprehensive Exam. Congratulations to Olga on achieving this important milestone! Her PhD committee are Prof. Elke Rundensteiner (WPI, Advisor), Prof. Daniel Dougherty (WPI), Prof. Mohamed Eltabakh (WPI), and Prof. David Maier (Portland State University).
On September 27th 2016, Rodica Neamtu successfully passed her PhD Dissertation Proposal "Interactive Exploration of Time Series Powered by Time Warped Distances", develops both theoretical underpinnings as well as technologies for processing rich classes of interactive queries over time series empowered by multiple distances. Congratulations to Rodica on achieving this important milestone. Her dissertation committee members are Prof. Elke Rundensteiner (WPI, Advisor), Prof. Gabor Sarkozy (WPI, Advisor), Prof. George Heineman (WPI), and Prof. Sam Madden (MIT).
On August 29th 2016, Phd student Ramoza Ashan has successfully passed her Ph.D. Comprehensive Exam. Congratulations to Ramoza on achieving this important milestone! Her PhD committee are Prof. Elke Rundensteiner (WPI, Advisor), Prof. Gabor Sarkozy (WPI), Prof. Xiangnan Kong (WPI), and Prof. Vassilis Athitsos (Univ. of Texas at Arlington).
PhD student Olga Poppe, supervised by Prof. Rundensteiner, is Research Intern at NEC Laboratories America, Inc in summer 2016.
PhD student Caitlin Kuhlman, supervised by Prof. Rundensteiner, is a "Social Good" Research Fellow at IBM TJ Watson in summer 2016.
On May 23rd 2016, Phd student Rodica Neamtu has successfully passed her Ph.D. Comprehensive Exam. Congratulations to Rodica on achieving this important milestone! Her PhD committee are Prof. Elke Rundensteiner (WPI, Advisor), Prof. Gabor Sarkozy (WPI, Advisor), Prof. George Heineman (WPI), and Prof. Sam Madden (MIT).
DSRG celebrated the graduations of Kaiyu Zhao, Lei Cao and Chuan Lei with a party at Elke's house. Photos are here. Photos are here.
On May 12th 2016, WPI's 148th Commencement Ceremony was held. Our newest PhD's Dr. Kaiyu Zhao, Dr. Lei Cao and Dr. Chuan Lei received their diploma from Prof. Elke Rundensteiner. See the photo here.
On May 11th 2016, Olga Poppe successfully passed her PhD Dissertation Proposal "Event Stream Analytics", focused on strategies for scaling analytics including trend discovery and aggregation on event streams. Congratulations to Olga on achieving this important milestone! Her dissertation committee members are Prof. Rundensteiner (advisor), Prof. Mohamed Eltabakh, Prof. Dan Dougherty, and Prof. D. Mailer from Portland State University.
On March 29th 2016, Lei Cao has received his Ph.D. degree from WPI.
On Feb 23rd 2016, Kaiyu Zhao has received his Ph.D. degree from WPI.
On Aug 17th 2015, Chuan Lei has received his Ph.D. degree from WPI.
On May 17th 2014, Karen Works has received her Ph.D. degree from WPI.
On April 17th 2014, Xika Lin won the 3rd prize in the Science PhD category in the final round of GRAD'14.
On April 17th 2014, Xika Lin was selected as finalist by the Arts and Sciences Advisory Board to participate in the final round of the i3 Competition "Investing in Ideas with Impact".
On April 16th 2014, the following papers were accepted for publication at SIGMOD'14:
  • Yingmei Qi, Lei Cao, Medhabi Ray and Elke A. Rundensteiner. Complex Event Analytics: Online Aggregation of Stream Sequence Patterns.
  • Dongqing Xiao and Mohamed Eltabakh. InsightNotes: Summary-Based Annotation Management in Relational Databases.
Xika Lin won the Deans' round of the i3 Competition "Investing in Ideas with Impact" in April 2014.
On March 19th 2014, Chuan Lei and Xika Lin won Research Poster Awards at senior PhD level and Maryam Hasan and Olga Poppe received Research Poster Awards at junior PhD level at GRAD'14.
Show news in 2013
On December 22nd 2013, the following papers were accepted for publication at EDBT'14:
  • Chuan Lei, Elke A. Rundensteiner and Mohamed Eltabakh. Redoop: Supporting Recurring Queries in Hadoop.
  • Venkatesh Raghavan and Elke A. Rundensteiner. CAQE: A Contract Driven Approach to Processing Concurrent Decision Support Queries.
  • Abhishek Mukherji, Elke A. Rundensteiner and Matthew Ward. COLARM: Cost-based Optimization for Localized Association Rule Mining.
On December 12th 2013, Jiayuan Wnag has successfully defended her MS thesis. Read more...

The real-time detection of anomalous phenomena on streaming data has become increasingly important for applications ranging from fraud detection, financial analysis to traffic management. In these streaming applications, often a large number of similar continuous outlier detection queries are executed concurrently. In the light of the high algorithmic complexity of detecting and maintaining outlier patterns for different parameter settings independently, we propose a shared execution methodology called SOP that handles a large batch of requests with diverse pattern configurations.

First, our systematic analysis reveals opportunities for maximum resource sharing by leveraging commonalities among outlier detection queries. For that, we introduce a sharing strategy that integrates all computation results into one compact data structure. It leverages temporal relationships among stream data points to prioritize the probing process. Second, this work is the first to consider predicate constraints in the outlier detection context. By distinguishing between target and scope constraints, customized fragment sharing and block selection strategies can be effectively applied to maximize the efficiency of system resource utilization. Our experimental studies utilizing real stream data demonstrate that our approach performs 3 orders of magnitude faster than the start-of-the-art and scales to 1000s of queries.

On November 4th 2013, Karen Works has successfully defended her PhD dissertation. Congratulations to Dr. Karen Works! Read more...

Karen Works' research has focussed on the development of novel technology for handling stream data with multiple levels of importance to an organization, and in particular, its multi-tiered priority-based query processing in the face of limited resources. Karen's contributions include but are not limited to the following core innovations:

  • proactive promotion infrastructure for multi-tiered stream processing to assure that the most important tuples are processed before those of less importance.
  • effective optimizer for efficiently constructing optimal multi-tierd plans.
  • run-time adaptive methodology to continuously allocate resources based on monitored available load and on estimated priority needs.
  • an array of sophisticated query operators tuned for effective processing within this novel infrastructure, which includes set-based operators like aggregation and multi-input based operators like joins, and
  • extensive experimental evaluation studies to assess the effectiveness of the proposed technology against state-of-the-art alternative solutions using real-world use cases.

We wish Dr. Karen Works best of luck in her professional career as Tenure-Track Professor of Computer Science at Westfield State University!

On October 15th 2013, the paper of Lei Cao and Elke A. Rundensteiner on "High Performance Stream Query Processing With Correlation-Aware Partitioning" was accepted for publication at VLDB'14.
On October 15th 2013, the paper of Lei Cao, Di Yang, Qingyang Wang, Yanwei Yu, Jiayuan Wang and Elke A. Rundensteiner on "Scalable Distance-Based Outlier Detection over High-Volume Data Streams" was accepted for publication at ICDE'14.
From July until September 2013, Chuan Lei got a chance to intern at LinkedIn Corporation and Medhabi Ray got a chance to intern at HP Research Labs.
On July 22nd 2013, the following papers were accepted for publication at CIKM'13:
  • Abhishek Mukherji, Jason Whitehouse, Christopher R. Botaish, Elke A. Rundensteiner, and Matthew O. Ward. SPHINX: A Parameter Space Explorer for Analyzing Evidence-Hypotheses Relationships.
  • Abhishek Mukherji, Xika Lin, Jason Whitehouse, Christopher R. Botaish, Elke A. Rundensteiner, and Matthew O. Ward. FIRE: Interactive Visual Support for Parameter Space-Driven Rule Mining.
  • Karim Ibrahim, Nate Selvo, Mohamed El-Rifai, and Mohamed Eltabakh. FusionDB: Conflict Management System for Small-Science Databases.
On May 17th 2013, Maryam Hasan, Abhishek Mukherji, Xika Lin, and Olga Poppe have received SIGMOD'13 student travel award.
On May 11th 2013, Di Wang has received her Ph.D. degree and Yingmei Qi has received her Master's degree from WPI.
On May 5th 2013, the paper of Dongqing Xiao and Mohamed Y. Eltabakh on "STEPQ: Spatio-Temporal Engine for Complex Pattern Queries" was accepted for publication at the International Symposium on Spatial and Temporal Databases (SSTD) 2013.
In April 2013, Xika Lin won the Deans' round of the i3 Competition "Investing in Ideas with Impact".
On April 29th 2013, Di Wang has successfully defended her PhD dissertation. Congratulations to Dr. Di Wang! Read more...

Di Wang's dissertation research has focussed on the development of several critical innovations within the context of complex event processing over high-volume data streams to further emerging applications ranging from on-line financial transactions, RFID based supply chain management to real-time object monitoring. In particular, her contributions include innovations and publications in top venues on the following topics: a. For applications which require access to both streaming and stored data, she has introduced an active complex CEP model with clear semantics and efficient scheduler algorithms in the face of concurrent access and failures. b. When deployed in a sensitive environment such as health care, she has proposed event-suppression technology critical for mitigating possible privacy leaks within the context of complex event processing systems. c. For high-performance inferencing of probabilistic identification of events with possible missing identifiers, her work not only provides a graphical model to capture this inference problem but she also designed general system optimizations that speed up existing inference strategies on streams up to 15 fold.

In addition, she was a key architect and developer of the HyReminder Web Application for employing CEP technology to track health care workers's activities at the UMASS Memorial Hospital. This software, currently deployed at UMASS ICUs, has undergone a clinical trial - showing clear positive indicators of the effectiveness of such electronic reminder technology. Results of this health care trial have been submitted to a health care meeting.

We thank everyone who was able to attend Di's presentation today and to lend Di support. In particular we would like to thank the committee members Prof. Dougherty, Prof. Eltabakh and the external committee member Dr. Badrish Chandramouli from Microsoft Research Labs for their time and effort in guiding Di through her PhD studies. We also thank the DSRG lab members for listening to Di's research, sharing ideas, and generally supporting each other over these years.

Now we wish Di best of luck in her professional career starting at BING! at Microsoft Corp.effective immediately.

In March 2013, Lei Cao won PhD second place Research Poster Award and Chuan Lei won Senior PhD Research Poster Award at GRAD'13.
On February 5th 2013, the following papers were accepted for publication at SIGMOD'13:
  • Di Wang, Yeye He, Elke A. Rundensteiner, and Jefferey Naughton. Utility-Maximizing Event Stream Suppression.
  • Abhishek Mukherji, Xika Lin, Christopher R. Botaish, Jason Whitehouse, Elke A. Rundensteiner, Matthew O. Ward, and Carolina Ruiz. PARAS: interactive parameter space exploration for association rule mining.
Show news in 2012
On December 22nd 2012, the following papers were accepted for publication at EDBT'13:
  • Mohamed Y. Eltabakh, Fatma Ozcan, Yannis Sismanis, Peter Haas, Hamid Pirahesh, and Jan Vondrak. Eagle-Eyed Elephant: Split-Oriented Indexing in Hadoop.
  • Di Wang, Elke A. Rundensteiner, Richard T. Ellison, and Han Wang. Probabilistic inference of object identifications for event stream analytics.
  • Medhabi Ray, Elke A. Rundensteiner, Mo Liu, Chetan Gupta, Song Wang, and Ismail Ari. High-performance complex event processing using continuous sliding views.
On October 14th 2012, the article of Chuan Lei, Elke A. Rundensteiner, and J. D. Guttman on "Robust Distributed Stream Processing" was accepted for publication at ICDE'13.
In April 2012, Yingmei Qi made into the top round of the i3 Competition "Investing in Ideas with Impact".
On April 5th 2012, Venkatesh (Venky) Raghavan has successfully passed his final Ph.D. Dissertation Defense. Congratulations to Dr. Venkatesh Raghavan! Read more...

Congratulations to Venky on having successfully conducted high-quality and innovative research, which has been published in top venues, including ICDE, Information Systems Journal, IDAR, and others, and several very well-received software demonstrations of core technologies in ACM SIGMOD. Venky's dissertation research falls in the area of big-data analytics and multi-criteria preference systems. His dissertation is entitled "Supporting Multi-Criteria Decision Support Queries over Disparate Data Sources". Given the exponential growth of information, providing services to help analysts, businesses and users alike to extract value from data is imperative for staying ahead and meeting one's information needs. In this context, Venky has designed a suite of innovative techniques and corresponding software technologies that tackle open problems in support of multi-dimensional preference (skyline) queries, enabling users to quickly grasp their prefered choices from a huge data store.

Venky has started his professional career at the Greenplum startup (now, an EMC company) in California, and is enjoying every day of it. He is getting his hands deep into the guts of a commercial query optimizer for large-scale distributed compute platforms - helping to build it from the grounds up to meet the BigData buzz. We wish him the very best success and fun in his future professional career in computing!

We also would like to thank everyone who was able to attend Venky's defense yesterday and lend their support to him. We thank the CS department, all faculty, the office and computing staff, for providing an amazingly nuturing environment in which Venky could mature into an accomplished researcher and Computer Scientist. It sure was a pleasure yesterday seeing Venky shine in his accomplishments -- he has come a long way, and I am proud of him. In particular, we thank the committee members Prof. Dan Dougherty, Prof. Murali Mani and Dr. Haixun Wang (Microsoft Research Asia) for their time, effort and extremely valuable feedback on Venky's work. Their help in guiding Venky is very much appreciated.

On March 7th 2012, Mo Liu has successfully passed her final Ph.D. Dissertation Defense. Congratulations to Dr. Mo Liu! Read more...

The committee has accepted her work subject to minor revisions, which Mo plans to apply to the manuscript in the following weeks. Congratulations to soon-to-be Dr. Liu! Congratulations to Mo on having conducted high-quality research, which has been published in top venues in the database field, including SIGMOD, ICDE, and others.

Mo's dissertation research falls in the area of Complex Event Processing on Data Streams. Specifically, her dissertation entitled "Extending Event Sequence Processing: New Models and Optimization Techniques" includes the design, development and evaluation of several techniques at the core of an E-Analytic system to achieve efficient, scalable and robust methods for in-memory multi-dimensional nested pattern analysis over high-speed event streams.

We would like to thank everyone who was able to attend Mo's defense and lend their support to Mo. We thank the CS department for providing a nuturing environment in which Mo Liu could mature into an accomplished Computer Scientist. In particular, we thank the committee members Prof. Dan Dougherty, Prof. Yanlei Diao, University of Massachusetts Amherst; Prof. Murali Mani, University of Michigan, Flint; and Prof. Ismail Ari, Ozyegin University, Turkey for their time and valuable feedback on Moi's work. In particular, Mo would like to extend a special thank you to Prof. Dan Dougherty, who has spent countless hours in helping Mo to explore the world of CEP language design, semantics and optimization. The committee's help in guiding Mo to make her work of the utmost quality is much appreciated.

Lastly, Mo Liu has started her professional career at Sybase, Inc, an SAP Company, in California. We wish her a fulfilling career complete with interesting challenges and both success and fun going forward, where ever life may take her.