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You are viewing: > Home > News & Events > DCS Events Calendar > JAN 5: Database CS Seminar
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JAN 5: Database CS Seminar

Event date: Tuesday, January 05, 2010, at 11:00 AM
Location: Bahen Centre, Rm 7256

Speaker: Daisy Zhe Wang
University of California, Berkeley

Title: Querying Probabilistic Information Extraction

Abstract: Recently there has been significant interest in extending database systems to deal with probabilistic information. Typical approaches attach some notion of uncertainty to data at the record and/or field level. Such approaches are limited in their ability to represent probabilistic correlations and thus, often require statistical inference to be performed outside of the database, leading to inefficient performance and inaccurate results. Instead we advocate for a closer integration of Statistical Machine Learning models into the database system itself.

In this talk, I will first describe the BayesStore project which is developing such an integrated probabilistic database system. I will also discuss a number of applications where such an integrated system would be particularly useful, including sensor data analytics, information extraction, intrusion detection systems, etc. For the rest of the talk, I will be focusing on one particular application -- Information Extraction (IE) to enable relational query processing to include data obtained from unstructured sources. Compared to approaches that use IE techniques outside of the database, we show that an integrated approach in which the statistical model and inference is supported natively in the database, and optimized with the relational operators can provide improvements in answer quality and efficiency. I will describe an implementation of these ideas that provides a query-oriented language for specifying, optimizing, and executing IE tasks, and supports a principled probabilistic framework for querying the outputs of those tasks.

Bio: Daisy Zhe Wang is a Ph.D. student in Computer Science department at UC Berkeley. She is a member of the database research group and RAD-Lab. She received her B.A.Sc. degree with honors from University of Toronto in 2005. Her research focuses on data management systems that support scalable, declarative, on-line data analytics based on Statistical Machine Learning models. She collaborated with Yahoo! Research, IBM Research at Almaden, and Intel Research on probabilistic information management. She also had industrial experience at Google and IBM Toronto Lab.


Hosted by: Renee Miller


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