All News Updates:
- I am co-organizing (with Guy Van den Broeck, Hung Ngo, Dan Suciu, and Virginia Vassilevska Williams) a Simons Institute Program in Fall 2023 titled Logic and Algorithms in Database Theory and AI. Looking forward to an exciting semester next year!
- Our paper called DPXPlain - a framework for explaining queries with differential privacy has been published at PVLDB, Vol 16 - Congrats to Yuchao and Amir!
- I am deeply honored to be selected for the VLDB Early Career Award 2022 for our work on helping users to understand query results, and on generating explanations for the computations that lead to them. Many thanks to the VLDB Endowment Award Committee and my nominators, and to the amazing students and postdocs, collaborators, and mentors for all the research collaborations, support, and advice over the years. Please check out the invited article published in PVLDB for this award with an overview of my research in this area titled Toward Interpretable and Actionable Data Analysis with Explanations and Causality
- I had an amazing experience in attending SIGMOD 2022, an in-person conference after three long years! It was great to see friends and colleagues, and I am thankful for the invitations to give a keynote at HILDA 2022, to serve as a panelist at the New Researcher Symposium, and to serve as a judge of the Student Research Competition.
- We (with Cynthia Rudin and Alexander Volfovsky) got a new "Fairness in AI" NSF award in collaboration with Amazon for the research in the AME Lab for causal inference. Many thanks to NSF and Amazon!
- Our third paper on hypothetical what-if and how-to reasoning using causality is accepted in the second round of SIGMOD 2022!
- Two papers on explaining wrong database queries with generalized instances, and showing formal learnability for selectivity functions for range queries, are accepted to SIGMOD 2022! Congrats Zhengjie, Amir, Xiao, Yuxi, and Haibo!
- We have a new Foundations and Trends in Databases article (with Boris Glavic and Alexandra Meliou): 'Trends in Explanations: Understanding and Debugging Data-driven Systems'!
- Two papers on explaining database queries with augmented provenance, and properties of inconsistency measures in noisy databases, accepted to SIGMOD 2021! Congrats Zhengjie and all collaborators!
- FLAME paper on large scale causal analysis accepted to JMLR! Congrats Tianyu, Marco, and team!
- Aggregated Deletion Propagation paper accepted to PVLDB 2020-21, Vol 14! Congrats Xiao, Shawn, and Shweta!
- We (Jun Yang, Kristin Stephens-Martinez, and I) received a new NSF IIS grant: "III: Small: Helping Novices Learn and Debug Relational Queries", on our HNRQ project based on our preliminary work I-Rex and RATest. Thanks, NSF!
- I am serving as a Demonstration Track PC Co-Chair of ICDE 2021. Please consider submitting your demonstration!
- I am co-organizing VLDB 2020 virtual Round Tables on (1) Women in Databases, (2) Provenance and Explanations, both with wonderful panels of experts. Please consider attending these events!
- Two demos accepted to VLDB 2020: I-Rex (to help learn, debug, and teach SQL queries) and MuSe (rule-based data repair from SIGMOD'20)! Congrats Zhengjie, Tiangang, Alex, Kevin, Amir, and Yihao!
We are already using our RATest system (paper, demo, video) for Relational Algebra in our database courses at Duke and hope to use I-Rex soon for SQL!
- Causal inference using adaptive hyperboxes accepted to UAI 2020! Congrats Marco and Vittorio!
- Three papers on semantics of rule-based data repair, causal relational learning, and computation of local sensitivity accepted to SIGMOD 2020! Congrats Amir, Harsh, Yuchao, and all collaborators!
- Causal inference for networks paper accepted to AISTATS 2020! Congrats Usaid, Marco, Vittorio!
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Participated in three amazing workshops and a panel on Big Data and AI/ML in 2019!
- Two demos accepted to VLDB 2019 on explaining query answers: LensXPlain (using provenance) and CAPE (beyond provenance)! Congrats Zhengjie, Andrew, and collaborators!
- Matching with Instrumental Variables in causal analysis accepted to UAI 2019! Congrats Usaid, Yameng, and Marco!
- Three papers on explaining query answers, explaining wrong queries, and explaining contention in shared clusters accepted to SIGMOD 2019! Congrats Zhengjie, Prajakta, and all collaborators!
- Optimal Dynamic Almost Matching Exactly (DAME) for Causal inference accepted to AISTATS 2019!
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I am co-chairing 11th International Workshop on Theory and Practice of Provenance (TAPP 2019) with Thomas Moyer.
Deadline: Feb 28, 2019 (abstract submission on Feb 21, 2019). Please consider submitting a paper!
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Potential Postdocs: Duke database group has multiple postdoc positions. Send me an email for more information.
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Thanks to NIH for our grant on matching methods for causal inference (big data and networks)! It is a collaborative project with Profs. Allison Aiello (UNC Chapel Hill, Global Public Health), Cynthia Rudin (Duke Computer Science), and Alexander Volfovsky (Duke Statistical Science).
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Thanks to NSF for my second NSF grant on causal analysis for big data! It is a collaborative project with Profs. Lise Getoor (UCSC) and Dan Suciu (UW).
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Thanks to NSF for funding my FIREFly project with an NSF CAREER Award!
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Stratos Idreos and I are organizing the ICDE 2017 Ph.D. symposium. The program is now finalized and includes a keynote by Prof. Magdalena Balazinska
and a panel "Doing a good Ph.D. and getting a job too"! We are delighted to have Profs. Amol Deshpande, Arun Kumar, Alexandros Labrinidis, and
Peter Triantafillou as our panelists!
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The call for Student Travel Award application of SIGMOD 2017 has been posted here. The application deadline is March 25, 2017. If you are a student interested in attending SIGMOD/PODS 2017, apply soon!
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Potential students:
I am looking for new Ph.D. students. If you are interested in databases(theory/applications),
and have a strong academic record and/or research experience,
you can send me an email with your CV.
If you are not a graduate student at Duke, you need to apply here,
and mention my name in your application.