Rares Vernica

[ra'-resh]

Topic: large scale data management, including indexing and approximate query answering.
Adviser: Prof. Michael J. Carey and Prof. Chen Li
Member of the Information Systems Group

PhD expected Winter 2011

I am currently looking for an internship position in large scale data management.

We are helping the victims of the Haiti earthquake by providing online services and data for finding missing people http://fr.ics.uci.edu/haiti

Curriculum Vitae (CV)

• Highlights
• Projects
• Publications
• Awards
• Hobby

Highlights

Summer 2007

Advanced to candidacy, PhD, University of California, Irvine;

Summer 2007

Intern at Microsoft Research - Data Management, Exploration and Mining Group (DMX);

Fall 2006

Advanced to candidacy, MS, University of California, Irvine;

Summer 2006

Intern at Yahoo! - Strategic Data Solutions;

Fall 2005

Graduate Student Fellowship, California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (CalIt²);

Fall 2005

Chair's Fellowship, Department of Computer Science, University of California, Irvine (UCI);

Fall 2004

BSc, “Politehnica” University of Bucharest, Romania.

Projects

ASTERIX

Developing new technologies for storing, indexing, and querying vast quantities of semi-structured information for parallel infrastructures;

Family Reunification

Developing data integration, indexing, and search techniques to help people find their loved ones during or after a disaster;

• Haiti Earthquake, providing online services and data for finding missing people;

Flamingo

Developing data cleaning techniques, i.e., how to deal with errors and inconsistencies in information systems;

• Flamingo Package, source-code for approximate string matching;
• Flamingo Toolkit, UDF functions for MySQL;
• PSearch, prototype on fuzzy search on the University of California, Irvine campus directory, provided as an alternative to the UCI Campus Directory and featured in this UCI article.

Publications

2010

• ASTERIX: Towards a Scalable, Semistructured Data Platform for Evolving World Models.
  Vinayak R. Borkar, Michael J. Carey, Chen Li, Nicola Onose, Rares Vernica, Alin Deutsch, Yannis Papakonstantinou, Vassilis J. Tsotras
  submitted for publication
• Efficient Parallel Set-Similarity Joins Using MapReduce.
  Rares Vernica, Michael J. Carey, Chen Li
  SIGMOD 2010

2009

• AKYRA: Efficient Keyword-Query Cleaning in Relational Databases.
  Rares Vernica, Chen Li
  submitted for publication
• Efficient top-k algorithms for fuzzy search in string collections.
  Rares Vernica, Chen Li
  KEYS 2009: 9-14. (Workshop on Keyword Search on Structured Data, collocated with SIGMOD 2009)
  pdf, pdf slides, doi;

2008

• Entity categorization over large document collections.
  Venkatesh Ganti, Arnd Christian König, Rares Vernica
  KDD 2008: 274-282.
  pdf, ppt, doi;
• SEPIA: estimating selectivities of approximate string predicates in large Databases.
  Liang Jin, Chen Li, Rares Vernica
  VLDB J. 17(5): 1213-1229 (2008).
  pdf, ppt, doi;
  Implementation is available as part of the Flamingo Package;

2006

• Relaxing Join and Selection Queries.
  Nick Koudas, Chen Li, Anthony K. H. Tung, Rares Vernica
  VLDB 2006: 199-210.
  pdf, ppt;
  Implementation is available in the Query Relaxation Package.

DBLP: Rares Vernica, list of publications from the DBLP Computer Science Bibliography

Awards

2009

Microsoft Student Travel Award for KEYS 2009, Workshop on Keyword Search on Structured Data, collocated with SIGMOD 2009;

2005-2006

Chair's Fellowship, Computer Science Department, University of California, Irvine;

2005

California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (CalIt²) Fellowship;

2005

Second place, Pentalog programming contest, Brasov, Romania;

1999 - 2004

Merit-Based Scholarship, "Politehnica" University of Bucharest, Romania.

Hobby

Kendo

• Member All United States Kendo Federation (AUSKF), Southern California Kendo Federation (SCKF), Costa Mesa Kendo Dojo;
• Rank 1 Dan;
• SCKF Fall Team Tournament, 2008 - 3rd place, Adult Kyu Team (photo).