Chen Li Associate Professor Department of Computer Science Bren Hall, Room 2092 University of California, Irvine Irvine, CA 92697-3435 Phone:  (949) 824-9470 (Office)  Fax: (949) 824-4056 CHENLI AT ics DOT uci . E Du http://www.ics.uci.edu/~chenli Database Group, Center for Machine Learning and Intelligent Systems

• Recent News
• Curriculum Vitae HTML, PDF
• Research and Students
• Grants, fellowships, awards
• Publications.
• Teaching
• Talks
• Miscellaneous

Recent News

• (4/1/2008) Launching PSearch: I am glad to release the PSearch Prototype to support interactive, fuzzy search for UCI Directory.
• (3/31/2008) This quarter I am teaching CS122B and CS224.
• (2/22/2008) New SIGMOD08 paper: The conference has accepted our paper titled "Cost-Based Variable-Length-Gram Selection for String Collections to Support Approximate Queries Efficiently", a joint work with Bin Wang and Xiaochun Yang when they visited our place last fall. The paper solves several open, important problems not addressed in our VLDB07 VGRAM paper.
• (2/1/2008) New Visitor: I am glad that Guoliang Li from Tsinghua University is visiting my research team for about four months.
• (12/12/2007) Today I attended a local computer industry forum about the computer cluster workforce in Orange County. There is an excellent survey on the needs of computer cluster workforce in the county. One interesting finding is that the county is facing the challenge of not being able to find enough workers in the IT industry. The survey also gives us some thoughts on how we design our education curriculum to meet the need of the industry.
• (12/2007) I am looking for a motivated BS/MS student for an independent research project. Requirements: strong java programming skills. Please contact me if you are interested.
• (10/2007) New paper on approximate string matching: Our recent paper titled "Efficient Merging and Filtering Algorithms for Approximate String Searches" by Chen Li, Jiaheng Lu, and Yiming Lu will appear in ICDE 2008. We developed new algorithms and indexing structures that can significantly improve the performance of approximate string search.
• (10/2007) New NSF Grant: We received an NSF grant of $95K for our proposal titled "SGER: Answering Approximate String Queries Using Variable-Length Grams."
• (8/2007) Visitors: Bin Wang and Xiaochun Yang are visiting our team again this summer. We will continue working on topics related to approximate query answering.
• Archived news

Research and Students

My research interests are in the fields of database and information systems, including data integration and sharing, data warehouses, data cleansing, data privacy, and information management on the Web. The following are several database projects I am working on.

Current Projects

• The Flamingo Project on Data Cleaning.
• The Family Reunification Project.
• Data sets of the history of data objects collected from 6 web sites in 1.5 years..

Past Projects

• The Raccoon Project on Data Integration and Sharing. I started this project several years ago, and it's in its final stage. I still have some ongoing research related to this project. But compared to the first two projects, this one is less active.

Current students, postdocs, and visitors

• Ph.D student: Alex Behm
• Ph.D student: Shengyue Ji
• Ph.D student: Yiming Lu
• Ph.D student: Michal Shmueli-Scheuer
• Ph.D student: Rares Vernica
• Postdoc: Jiaheng Lu.
• Visitors: Bin Wang and Xiaochun Yang from Northeastern University, China.

Past students and visitors

• Liang Jin, MS in 2005, now at Microsoft.
• Jia Li, MS in 2005, now working in the bay area.
• Vassia Pavlaki, PhD student from NTUA, Greece. Visitor, Summer 2005 and April 2006.
• Houtan Shirani-Mehr, MS in 2006, now PhD student at USC.
• Chris Trezzo, Undergrad student (SURF-IT), summer 2006.
• Bin Wang (PhD candidate) and Xiaochun Yang (professor), Northeastern University, China. Visitors, summer 2006.
• Qi Zhong, MS in 2005, now at Microsoft.

Recent committee services: ICDE 2009 Demo Track, CIKM 2008, VLDB 2008, WWW 2008, ICDE 2008, KDD 2007, SIGMOD07, ICDT07, KDD06, CIKM06, CleanDB06 (Workshop cochair), SIGMOD06 Undergraduate Scholarship Program, IQIS06, ICDE06 Committee for tutorial proposals, VLDB05 (IIS), SIGMOD05 Demo track, PODS05 Proceedings Chair, DASFAA05.

Grants, fellowships, awards

• ICS Ted & Janice Smith Faculty Seed Fund (December 2006).
• Google Research Award (September 2006, renewable for a 2nd year)
• Microsoft unrestricted research grant (April 2006)
• UCI Faculty Career Development Award (2005)
• Recipient of National Science Foundation CAREER Award (No. IIS-0238586, 2003 - 2008, single PI).
• Senior investigator of National Science Foundation Award No. 0331707: RESCUE (2003 - 2008).
• Stanford Graduate Fellowship, Stanford University, 1997 - 2001.
• Entrance exams to Tsinghua University waived (undergrad 1989, MS 1994).

Teaching

• Fall, 2007: CS222 (formerly ICS214A), Principles of Database Management.
• Other taught courses.

Some Recent Talks and Presentations (not up to date)

• Answering Approximate Queries Efficiently, seminars at SRI and Yahoo!, August, 2006.
• Supporting Approximate String Matching, Talk at Google, December, 2005.
• Selectivity Estimation for Fuzzy String Predicates in Large Data Sets, Talk at VLDB 2005, Trondheim, Norway, August 30 - September 2, 2005.
• Indexing Mixed Types for Approximate Retrieval, Talk at VLDB 2005, Trondheim, Norway, August 30 - September 2, 2005.
• Answering Queries with Fuzzy String Predicates. Seminar at University of Washington, July 2005.
• Answering Queries with Fuzzy String Predicates. Seminar at UCSB, June 2005.
• Secure XML Publishing without Information Leakage in the Presence of Data Inference, Talk at VLDB, Toronto, Canada, August 29 - September 3, 2004.
• Seminars at Tsinghua University, Beijing, China, August, 2004
• NNH: Improving Performance of Nearest-Neighbor Searches Using Histograms , Talk at EDBT 2004, Crete, Greece, March, 2004