Photo by Heri Ramampiaro in 6/2010. I am the middle guy in the front row :-)

Chen Li

Professor
Department of Computer Science
School of Information and Computer Sciences
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
Information Systems Group
Vice Chair of Department of Computer Science.
Founder of SRCH2 on Powerful Search

Recent News.
Curriculum Vitae: PDF.
Released Prototypes and Source Code Packages
Research Projects
Students
Grants, Fellowships, Awards
Publications.
Miscellaneous

Recent News

Check our ISG Group Page for recent news about our group.
(4/2013) Attending DASFAA 2013 in Wuhan, China. Sharad and I gave a talk for our 10-year best paper award. Here's a picture at the ceremony. Here are our slides: [Chen's PPT], [Sharad's PPT].
(4/2013) Two papers collaborated with my Chinese colleagues were accepted by SIGMOD 2013, one titled "String Similarity Measures and Joins with Synonyms" with Jiaheng Lu and Chunbin Lin at Renming University, and one titled "Improving Regular-Expression Matching on Strings Using Negative Factors" with Xiaochun Yang et al at Northeastern University.
(4/6/2013) We are very excited to release our AsterixDB alpha! Here are some pictures at our celebrarion dinner. Stay tuned for the beta release, which is coming soon!
(3/2013) Prof. Xiaohui and I received an NIH grant of $662K on assembling complete individual genomes. I am working with a team to do efficient genome assembly using parallel computing in our ASTERIX project.
(2/2013) Our PhD student, Alex Behm, has graduated and will join Cloudera. See the pictures taken at his party.
(1/13/2013) Our DASFAA 2003 paper titled "Efficient Record Linkage in Large Data Sets" received the 10-year Best Paper Award for DASFAA 2013. It was my first paper in the area of data cleaning and approximiate string search in the context of the Flamingo project.
(1/7/2013) This quarter I am teaching CS122B titled "Projects in Databases and Web Applications."
(11/6/2012) On the Election Day I gave an invited talk about Election and ASTERIX at the ACM GIS BigSpatial workshop in Redondo Beach, CA.
(11/5/2012) I was invited to write an article titled "Entrepreneurship in Data Management Research" at the ACM SIGMOD Blog.
(11/1/2012) "Full professor-ed" :-)
(9/27/2012) This quarter I am teaching CS222/CS122C titled "Principles of Data Management." For the first time it's co-listed as a undergraduate course CS122C since we want to encourage undergraduate students to get familiar with "what's inside a DBMS system" earlier.
(9/2012) I visited several universties and companies in China to talk about our research on powerful search and ASTERIX.
(8/2012) I gave a talk titled "Search as You Type: From Research to Commercialization" at the DBRank 2012 workshop at VLDB in Istanbul, Turkey.
(8/2012) I gave a talk titled "Supporting Efficient Top-k Queries in Type-Ahead Search" at SIGIR.
(5/2012) Our paper titled "Supporting Efficient Top-k Queries in Type-Ahead Search" with Tsinghua colleagues (Guoliang Li, Jiannan Wang, and Jianhua Feng) got accepted by SIGIR. It is amazing to see how reviewers from different communities (Databases and Information Retrieval) have so different tastes :-)
(5/2012) Our paper titled "Executing SQL over encrypted data in the database-service-provider model" received ACM SIGMOD 2012 Test-of-Time Award. The paper, published 10 years ago, envisioned the "Database as a service" model.
(4/2012) This quarter I am again teaching CS122B titled "Projects in Databases and Web Applications". I am also organizing the CS Seminar Series.
(3/2012) I gave a talk at University of Toronto titled Improving Search for Emerging Applications.
(3/2012) We recently released a paper titled Analysis of Instant Search Query Logs. It is based on our study to analyze the log of our instant, fuzzy search system called PSearch. We compared it with a traditional search system and showed the benefits of the new search paradigm. Some user behavior patterns are very interesting.
(2/2012) I am glad to receive the 2012 ICS Dean's Award for Graduate Student Mentoring.
(1/2012) We released an improved version of the source code of the Hobbes project.
(12/2011) Our paper titled Hobbes: optimized gram-based methods for efficient read alignment was published by Nucleic Acids Research.
(9/2011) This quarter I am teaching CS122B titled "Projects in Databases and Web Applications". I am also organizing the CS Seminar Series.
(9/2011) Check OmniPlaces.com, a location-based search engine to demonstrate the technology of Bimaple. It also has an iPhone App.
(9/2011) Check a cool system built by our students, Sattam Alsubaiee and Zachary Heilbron, to support spatial aggregation on Twitter data using ASTERIX.
(8/26/2011) Our PhD student, Rares Vernica, co-advised by Prof. Mike Carey, has successfully graduated and will join HP Labs. Here's a picture of our celebration. We will surely miss Rares!
(8/2011) Our MS student, Nagesh Honnalli, has successfully graduated and will join Amazon. Here's a picture of our celebration.
Archived news

Released Prototypes and Source Code Packages

Flamingo Packge: C++ package to do approximate string queries.
ASTERIX.
Fuzzy keyword search on maps
qSpell: Spelling Correction of Web Search Queries (won the 3rd Prize in Microsoft's speller challenge in 2011)
Lightweight In-Memory Implementation of R*-Tree (maintained by Sattam Alsubaiee).
iPubMed: Instant fuzzy search on more than 20 million medical publications from MEDLINE.
Instant fuzzy search for learning.
Location-based instant fuzzy search.
Location-based approximate keyword search.
CHIME : Error-tolerant Chinese input method.
PSearch: Instant fuzzy search on the UCI directory.
Efficient Parallel Set-Similarity Joins Using MapReduce.
Haiti family reunification: Instant fuzzy search on records about people affected by the Haiti earthquake.
DNAzip: DNA sequence compression using a reference genome.
Hobbes: genome sequence mapping.

Research

My research interests are in the fields of databases and information retrieval, including search, data-intensive computing, data integration and sharing, data warehouses, data cleansing, and Web information management. The following are several database projects I am working on.

Current Projects

ASTERIX: Mike Carey and I are starting this project on Active, Scalable, Transactional Enterprise Repository for Information in XML. It's a new effort to develop a scalable semi-structured information management system, based on XML and XQuery technologies, targeting very large shared-nothing compute clusters.
FLAMINGO: A project on data cleaning.
IPUBMED: Efficient instant search on large amounts of data. It started with the joint research project with Tsinghua University on efficient auto-complete and type-ahead search on large data sets.

Past Projects

Family Reunification. Help people find their loved ones during or after a disaster.
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.
Data sets of the history of data objects collected from 6 web sites in 1.5 years..

Students

Current students

Ph.D student: Sattam Mubark Alsubaiee
Ph.D student: Inci Cetindil
Ph.D student: Jamshid Esmaelnezhad

Graduated PhD Students

Michal Shmueli-Scheuer: PhD 2009, first appointment: researcher at IBM Haifa Research Lab
Shengyue Ji, PhD 2011, first appointment: Google.
Rares Vernica: PhD 2011 (co-advised with Professor Michael Carey), first appointment, HP Labs.
Alex Behm: PhD 2013 (co-advised with Professor Michael Carey), first appointment, Cloudera.

Past MS students, Postdocs, and visitors

Athena Ahmadi, MS, 2012, Google
Alex Behm, MS, 2012, Google
Manik Sikka, MS, 2011
Sandeep Paul Katumalla, MS
Nagesh Honnalli, MS, 2010 - 2011, Amazon
Andrea Zilio, Exchange student from Italy, 2010 - 2011, Google.
Yabin Zheng, 2009 - 2010, Visiting PhD student from Tsinghua University, China.
Prof. Heri Ramampiaro, 2009 - 2010, Visiting professor from Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU).
Vijay Rajakumar, MS 2008-2010. Bimaple
Minh Doan, MS 2008-2010.
Jiaheng Lu, Postdoc 2006-2008, first appointment: faculty at Renmin University, China.
Yiming Lu, MS 2006-2008, first appointment: Microsoft.
Vassia Pavlaki, PhD student from NTUA, Greece. Visitor, Summer 2005 and April 2006.
Bin Wang (PhD candidate) and Xiaochun Yang (professor), Northeastern University, China. Visitors, summer 2006, summer 2007.
Houtan Shirani-Mehr, MS in 2006, became a PhD student at USC.
Chris Trezzo, Undergrad student (SURF-IT), summer 2006.
Jia Li, MS in 2005, first appointment: an IT company in the bay area.
Liang Jin, MS in 2005, first appointment: Microsoft.
Qi Zhong, MS in 2005, first appointment: Microsoft.

Grants, fellowships, awards

2013, 10-year Best Paper Award for the DASFAA 2003 paper titled "Efficient Record Linkage in Large Data Sets" by Liang Jin, Chen Li, and Sharad Mehrotra.
2012, ACM SIGMOD 2012 Test-of-Time Award for the SIGMOD 2002 paper titled "Executing SQL over encrypted data in the database-service-provider model" by Hakan Hacigumus, Bala Iyer, Chen Li, and Sharad Mehrotra.
2012, UCI ICS Dean's Award for Graduate Student Mentoring.
2011, I advised a group of students to participate in the Microsoft Speller Challenge and won the third place.
2010, Intel grant on compression of human genome data.
NSF research award IIS 1030002 on powerful keyword search in a cloud-computing infrastructure, 2010.
2009 UCI ICS Dean's Award for excellence in Mid-Career Research.
2009, NSF research award 0910989 titled "DC: Large: Collaborative Research: ASTERIX: A Highly Scalable Parallel Platform for Semistructured Data Management and Analysis."
2008, Research Funding Award of the "Research Funds for Oversea Scholars" program of the National Natural Science Foundation of China.
NSF SGER grant No. IIS-0742960, 2007.
ICS Ted & Janice Smith Faculty Seed Fund (December 2006).
Google Research Award (September 2006).
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)
Recent committee services: PVLDB 2011, SIGMOD 2010 (Group Leader), VLDB 2010, ICDE 2010 (also Local Arrangements Chair), PVLDB 2009, PVLDB 2008, 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 (chair), IQIS06, ICDE06 Committee for tutorial proposals, VLDB05 (IIS), SIGMOD05 Demo track, PODS05 Proceedings Chair, DASFAA05.


For any problems, questions or suggestions about this page, please contact chenli @ ics.uci.edu.	rev. Saturday, April 27, 2013 - 18:26:54