Alexander Behm

Alex is a PhD student in the Information Systems Group at UCI working on data management challanges such as approximate search, large-scale data integration, and query/performance optimization. He received his B.Sc. (Hons) from the University of Cooperative Education in Stuttgart (Germany) during which he was employed by IBM Germany. His undergraduate studies included one semester at the Staffordshire University of Computing (UK) and three co-ops at IBM, two of which he spent at the IBM Almaden Research Center in San Jose (CA, USA). Later, he worked as an IT-Consultant at the Deutsche Bank, designing and implementing a data entry system with information integration and automated reporting functionality. Alex is a C++ enthusiast and apart from publicizing his work in research papers he is committed to writing high-performance, robust code and contributing to the open source community as demonstrated by the latest release of The Flamingo Project. He is also experimenting with Hadoop for parallel data processing and actively shares his insights on his webpage.
Alex was born in Madrid (Spain), grew up in Frankfurt (Germany) and was raised bilingually (English, German).

• 04/2009 Added pdf, slides and poster for paper on inverted-index compression in ICDE 2009 (see Publications)
• 01/2009 Added HOWTO in the Hadoop section on deciding the number of Map and Reduce tasks
• 12/2008 Added the first two HOWTOs in the Hadoop section on accessing HDFS outside of Hadoop and using the distributed cache
• 11/2008 We released version 2.0.1 of The Flamingo Project for approximate string search
• 09/2008 ICDE 2009: Our paper on inverted-index compression for approximate string search was accepted as a full paper (see Publications)