Chen Li

Archived News

  • (8/2007) New PhD student: I am glad that Alex Behm has joined our research team as a new PhD student.
  • (6/2007) Summer: My students, Ray and Yiming, will be doing summer internships at Microsoft Research and IBM T.J. Watson, respectively. I will be traveling early summer in China, attending conferences and visting schools and companies. After that, I will be working with my students, postdoc, and visitors at UCI. There are several very exciting ideas I would like to pursue.
  • (6/2007) Tenured.
  • (6/2007) VGRAM for VLDB07: Our paper titled "VGRAM: Improving Performance of Approximate Queries on String Collections Using Variable-Length Grams" by Chen Li, Bin Wang, and Xiaochun Yang will appear in VLDB 2007. I am glad that the reviewers liked the work as much as we do.
  • (4/17/2007) Flamingo 1.0 Release: I am glad to release our Flamingo Package 1.0 on approximate string matching.
  • (4/17/2007) Release of Web-object-history data: I am glad to release our data set of the history of data objects collected from 6 web sites in 1.5 years.
  • (4/2007) SIGMOD07 Undergraduate Scholarship Program: I am chairing this program. Click here for more information.
  • (4/2007) Teaching: This quarter I am teaching CS223 (formerly ICS214B) - Transaction Processing and Distributed Data Management.
  • (1/2007) Teaching: This quarter I am teaching CS122B (formerly ICS185), Projects in Database Management.
  • (12/2006) Research Funds: I received an ICS Ted & Janice Smith Faculty Seed Fund and an ICS CORCLR research/travel fund.
  • (12/2006) NSF Proposals: My team and I submitted two proposals to the NSF IIS program. Both proposals are based on our observations on several critical problems the solutions of which are greatly needed by many real applications.
  • (9/2006) New Project on Family Reunification: Ray and I have started working on a new project called Family Reunification. It's a data-integration project using real data from many Web sources. It's part of the RESCUE project. More information will come soon.
  • (9/2006) Release of SEPIA 1.0: Ray has released SEPIA 1.0 on selectivity estimation of fuzzy string predicases based on our VLDB 2005 paper.
  • (9/2006) New Junior Specialist: We have a new junior specialist, Jiaheng Lu, who is joining our research team. He's expecting his PhD from the National University of Singapore. He will be working on projects related to data integration.
  • (9/2006) Google Research Award: I received a Google Research Award in the amount of $37,500 renewable for a second year. It will be used to support my research on data cleaning, especially on approximate string searching. I am very thankful for their support, especially since this is the largest support I received from the industry.
  • (7/2006) Work on Data Exchange: Recently I finished a technical report with Foto Afrati and Vassia Pavlaki (at NTUA, Greece) titled "Data Exchange with Arithmetic Comparisons." It is a work we have been working on for almost one year: all of us went to Stanford for one week, and Vassia visited UCI twice. It took us a lot of time to think about all the subtle issues that are not covered in the excellent paper on data exchange by Fagin et al. I am glad that finally we completed the work, and I really like it.
  • (6/2006) Summer: My student, Ray, is doing a summer internship at Yahoo!. My other students are working with me during the summer. I will have two visitors (Xiaochun Yang and Bin Wang). I will visit a few places (IBM, SRI, Yahoo, Google, possibly Toronto, and VLDB in Korea). Well, these will keep me busy enough, not to mention I have two sons to play with :-)
  • (5/2006) New PhD Student: I am glad that a new student, Yiming Lu, is joining our PhD program soon. He graduated from Shanghai Jiaotong University with a BS and an MS, and has been working on data quality at Microsoft Research Asia.
  • (5/2006) Work on Query Relaxation: Our paper titled Relaxing Join and Selection Queries (joint work with Nick Koudas, Anthony Tung, and my student, Rares Vernica) will appear in VLDB 2006, Seoul, Korea. It is about how to relax empty-answer SQL queries in RDBMS in order to compute answers for users with a minimal relaxation. We use skyline as our relaxation framework, in which we need to consider join conditions as well. The work extends our previous work on supporting approximate query answering in applications such as data cleaning. See our two VLDB'2005 papers on similar topics.
  • (5/2006) CleanDB Workshop: I am currently organizing the CleanDB Workshop with Dongwon Lee. It will be colocated with VLDB2006 in Seoul, Korea.
  • (5/2006) New Release of StringMap: I spent some days cleaning the StringMap code that supports approximate string searches and joins. The new release is available at here.
  • (4/2006) $$ from M$R: In April 2006, I received an unrestricted gift fund from Microsoft Research. I want to thank them for their generous support. It's very encouraging, and I wish to receive more support from the industry in the future.