Chen Li

Archived News

  • (11/2008) Launch of our new ISG group home page: Check out this new page of our Information Systems Group (ISG)!
  • (11/2008) First paper on bioinformatics: My first paper on bioinformatics titled "Human genomes as email attachments" has been published on the journal Bioinformatics. We used novel techniques to compress a human genome from 3.2GB to 4.1MB. From the date we submitted the paper (Oct. 7, 2008) to the date it was published online (Nov. 7, 2008), it took just one month! The PDF is available at here. It was once the No. 1 most-frequently read article in the Journal of Bioinformatics in January and February of 2009 according to the following link (as of March 2009).
  • (10/2008) Flamingo Release 2.0: we are glad to release version 2.0 of the package to sup\ port fuzzy string search. Version 2.0.1 (released on Nov. 7, 2008) fixed compatibility issues for GCC 4.3.2.
  • (9/2008) New funding award from China: Together with Prof. Xiaochun Yang from Northeastern University of China, I received a funding award from the "Research Funds for Oversea Scholars" program of the National Natural Science Foundation of China. It will support our research on fuzzy search on text documents.
  • (9/2008) Sabbatical: I am on sabbatical this year. I will be mainly at UCI.
  • (9/2008) New PhD students: Two new PhD students, Minh Doan and Sattam Mubark Alsubaiee, have joined our research team.
  • (9/2008) New ICDE2009 Publications: We have two full research papers accepted by ICDE 2009: "Space-Constrained Gram-Based Indexing for Efficient Approximate String Search," by Alexander Behm, Shengyue Ji, Chen Li, and Jiaheng Lu; "Best-Effort Top-k Query Processing Under Budgetary Constraints," by Michal Shmueli-Scheuer, Chen Li, Yosi Mass, Haggai Roitman, Ralf Schenkel, and Gerhard Weikum. In addition, I will be presenting a tutorial titled "Efficient Approximate Search on String Collections" with Marios Hadjieleftheriou (from AT&T Labs--Research).
  • (8/2008) Mike Carey joined us! We are extremely happy that Prof. Mike Carey has joined our department.
  • (7/3/2008) Launching Search@ICS: I am glad to our research prototype has been launched on the ICS Homepage that can support interactive, fuzzy search for ICS people and general pages at ICS.UCI.EDU.
  • (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.
  • (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.