Kevin Chang

Ph.D. Stanford University, 2001

Research Statement

Information abounds in our civilization and inundates our daily life. My research focuses on information access and data management, in a large scale. The essential challenges of large-scaleinformation systems arise from both "much data" and "many sources": On the one hand, the sheer amount of structured and unstructured data challenges us for efficient querying, in order to find the desired information. On the other hand, the massive number of heterogeneous sources in our cyberinfrastructure challenges us for effective integration, in order to bring together data scattered across sources. Our research efforts thus center around the dual themes of dealing with data and sources in large-scale information systems.

Our current activities pursue in both fronts: First, for efficient querying, the AIM project develops algorithmic framework for supporting ranked top-k queries, to find results from a large database by flexible rank-based queries. Second, for effective integration, the MetaQuerier project builds ad-hoc and dynamic integration systems for accessing myriad databases on the Internet -- or the "deep Web".