Querying Big Data: Theory and Practice

Title: Querying Big Data: Theory and Practice

Speaker: Wenfei Fan (University of Edinburgh and Beihang University)

Time: 25 August 2014, 10:30

Venue: Seminar Room (334), Level 3, Building 5, Institute of Software, CAS

Big data introduces challenges to query answering, from theory to practice. A number of questions arise. What queries are “tractable” on big data? How can we make big data “small” so that it is feasible to find exact query answers? When exact answers are beyond reach in practice, what approximation theory can help us strike a balance between the quality of approximate query answers and the costs of computing such answers? This talk aims to provide an overview of recent advances in the study of querying big data.

Professor Wenfei Fan is the Chair of Web Data Management in the School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh, UK, and the director of the International Research Center on Big Data, Beihang University, Beijing, China. Prior to his move to the UK, he worked for Bell Labs, Lucent Technologies in the US. He received his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania, USA, and his MS and BS from Peking University, China. Professor Fan is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, UK, a Fellow of the ACM, USA, a National Professor of the 1000-Talent Program and a Yangtze River Scholar, China.  He is a recipient of the Alberto O. Mendelzon Test-of-Time Award of ACM PODS 2010, the Best Paper Award for VLDB 2010, the Roger Needham Award in 2008 (UK), the Best Paper Award for ICDE 2007, the Outstanding Overseas Young Scholar Award in 2003, the Best Paper of the Year Award for Computer Networks in 2002, and the Career Award in 2001 (USA). His current research interests include database theory and systems, in particular big data, data quality, data integration, distributed query processing, query languages, recommender systems, social networks and Web services.