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

Chen Li

Associate 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
Founder of Bimaple Technology Inc. on Powerful Local 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.
(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.
(7/2011) Check my blog on instant search.
(7/8/2011) We are glad to release the first software to support instant fuzzy search on large data sets.
(6/24/2011) Check the video clip on the Bimaple homepage to show location-based instant, fuzzy search on iPhone and a live demo on more than 17 million records.
(6/17/2011) I advised a group of students to participate in the Microsoft Speller Challenge and won the third place. Congratulations to the team! Here is our qSpeller project page for the Microsoft Speller Challenge.
(5/18/2011) Bimaple released a prototype to do location-based instant, fuzzy search. To our best knwoledge, it is the first system that can do this type of search in a unified framework.
(5/2011) We (my Tsinghua colleagues and I) released our CHIME demo to support error-tolerant Chinese input. It's based on our coming IJCAI 2011 paper.
(4/22/2011) I gave an invited talk titled "The Flamingo Software Package on Approximate String Queries" at the DQIS 2011 workshop in Hong Kong. Here is the Powerpoint file.
(4/2011) Our paper titled "ASTERIX: Towards a Scalable, Semistructured Data Platform for Evolving-World Models" by the ASTERIX project has been accepted for publication in Distributed and Parallel Databases.
(4/2011) Our paper titled "An Efficient Error-Tolerant Chinese Pinyin Input Method" with Tsinghua collaborators (Yabin Zheng and Maosong Sun) has been accepted for publication in IJCAI 2011. It's my first paper in this conference :-)
(4/2011) Our paper titled "Location-Based Instant Search" with my graduated student Shengyue Ji has been accepted by the SSDBM conference.
(4/2011) I am glad to launch the Hobbes project on genome sequence mapping.
(3/26/2011) This quarter I am again teaching CS122B: Projects in Databases and Web Applications.
(2/2011) My PhD student, Shengyue Ji, has just graduated and joined the "Don't be evil" company.
(2/2011) Check a new system prototype Bimaple built to support instant, error-tolerant search on Stack Overflow messages.
(1/2/2011) This quarter I am teaching CS122B: Projects in Databases and Web Applications.
(1/2/2011) The company I am starting, Bimaple, is hiring: http://www.bimaple.com/jobs.html.
(12/5/2010) On the weekend of Dec. 4-5, I attended the Random Hacks of Kindness (RhoK) in Chicago. Together with three other people on a team and my UCI students, Manik Sikka, Vijay Rajakumar, and Inci Centindl, we did a project of supporting full-text search on the Person Finder project on the Google App Engine platform. Our project won the third-best-project prize.
(11/2010) Check my new "photo" above. Thanks to Heri Ramampiaro for taking the nice picture :-)
(10/2010) Our paper titled "Answering Approximate String Queries on Large Data Sets Using External Memory" with Alexander Behm and Michael Carey has been accepted by ICDE 2011.
(10/23/2010) We are glad to release the Flamingo Package Version 4.0.
(10/2010) My student, Shengyue Ji, received a Yahoo! Best Dissertation Student Award.
(9/2010) My student, Alex Behm, received an ARCS scholar award.
(9/2010) Together with Professor Xiaohui Xie, I am receving an NIH grant to support our research on the iPubMed system.
Archived news

Released Prototypes and Source Code Packages

Flamingo Packge: C++ package to do approximate string queries.
Fuzzy keyword search on maps
iPubMed: Instant fuzzy search on more than 20 million medical publications from MEDLINE.
Location-based instant fuzzy 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 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

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: Athena Ahmadi
Ph.D student: Sattam Mubark Alsubaiee
Ph.D student: Alex Behm
Ph.D student: Inci Cetindil
MS student: Sandeep Paul Katumalla
MS student: Manik Sikka

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.

Past MS students, Postdocs, and visitors

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

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.
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. Friday, December 23, 2011 - 12:59:38