Short Bio
Alex is a PhD candidate in the Information Systems Group at UCI
working on approximate string matching
(Flamingo
& Hobbes Projects), and
large-scale storage and indexing (Asterix &
Hyracks Projects). He
received his B.S. from the University of Cooperative Education in
Stuttgart (Germany) which included one semester in the UK. Alex has
gained industry experience at Microsoft Research, the IBM Almaden Research Center, and at the Deutsche Bank.
Apart from being an avid programmer, Alex is committed to publicizing his work in research papers as well
as contributing to the open source community. Alex was born in Madrid
(Spain), grew up in Frankfurt (Germany) and was raised bilingually
(English, German).
Projects
- 01/2012 We've released the Hobbes source code!
- 12/2011 Our Hobbes paper was accepted for publication in Nucleic Acids Research (see Publications)!
- 11/2011 We released a new version of Hobbes Hobbes that includes paired-end mapping, support for compressed read files, and several usability and bug fixes.
- 03/2011 Hobbes is out! We just released our new package on DNA sequence alignment, called Hobbes. We outperform BWA and Bowtie in many cases for short reads using hamming distance, albeit at a higher memory cost. You can try Hobbes online or download the package.
- 03/2011 Our paper titled "ASTERIX: Towards a Scalable, Semistructured Data Platform for Evolving-World Models" has been accepted for publication in Distributed and Parallel Databases.
- 10/2010 We released version 4.0 of Flamingo which includes includes the LBAK-Tree (our GIS 2010 paper), performance improvements, support for updates to in-memory indexes and more. Check out our message at DBWorld
- 10/2010 ICDE 2011: Our paper on disk-based indexing for approximate string queries has been accepted (see Publications)
- 09/2010 I am happy to receive the National Achievement Rewards for College Scientists (ARCS) Award
- 09/2010 GIS 2010: Our paper on supporting location-based approximate-keyword queries has been accepted (see Publications)
- 08/2010 I have made my first code checkins as new member of the Asterix/Hyracks project for parallel data-intensive computing. Check out the Hyracks Google Code Project and the Asterix Homepage.
- 03/2010 We released version 3.0 of The Flamingo Project! It includes new features such as compressed in-memory indexes and disk-based components, along with new efficient search algorithms. Check out our release notes on DBWorld.
- 01/2010 Haiti Earthquake Family Reunification: Our group is working on getting data about missing people in the Haiti Earthquake and doing powerful search on it. Check out our prototype Haiti Earthquake Family Reunification.
- 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)