With the expanded reach of the Web to end users and ubiquitous usage of databases for managing data and information, the boundary between databases and the Web is blurring. The ways of interacting with a database are not limited to the conventional paradigm of structured queries anymore, as information retrieval facilities such as ranking are pushed into database systems. Similarly there are great needs of data management and structured query supports for exploiting the huge amount of information on the Web. In this talk, I will give an overview of my recent works on bringing novel retrieval and mining facilities into database engines, and on mashing up structured information on the Web. The first half of the talk will focus on RankSQL, a DBMS that provides a systematic and principled framework for ranking. The second half focuses on an ongoing project on managing, querying, and exploring Wikipedia.

Chengkai Li is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Texas at Arlington. His research interests are in the areas of databases, Web data management, data mining, and information retrieval. He works on data retrieval/analysis/exploration, ranking and top-k queries, query processing and optimization, Web search, mining, and integration, and XML query processing. Chengkai received his Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2007, and a M.E. and a B.S. degree in Computer Science from Nanjing University.

URL: http://ranger.uta.edu/~cli

Email: cli [at] uta [dot] edu