Thursday, June 11, 2009

Spreadsheets in Google

Google recently released beta version of the two products that brings a lot of justification for my ICDE work on spreadsheet interface for a database:

Fusion tables. Using a spreadsheet interface to manipulate and collaborate on tables. Different users can upload their tables or work on the same table. Users can discuss on the table about changes made to a row or cell. Fusion tables also provide simple search facility like filtering and aggregation.



Google Squared. Squared generates tables of facts from a search. For example, US presidents. The backend technology is of course information extraction.



For both products, my work can provide additional capability of search to the spreadsheets. To be exact, my work can support a core single-block SQL query on spreadsheets, using just mouse-clicks and simple keyboard input. This capability will make both Fusion tables and squared much more useful. I suspect that Google will roll out such changes soon. Here is a snapshot of how my work would query a table. For simple filters, just one-click away. The picture actually shows a complex query where we are comparing a column with another column of aggregation results (average car price). For more details, you may refer to the ICDE'09 paper.

Monday, April 27, 2009

Recent update: ICDE trip and summer plan

I just came back from my ICDE trip in Shanghai, China. It's a great experience. Limited by time, I won't write too much about the whole thing. What I liked the most was the poster session - all full papers and shot papers were there. I had much fun talking to a lot of people about their work and my work. The direct interaction gave me much more useful information than listening to talks or giving a talk. I hope this can be carried over to SIGMOD and VLDB, too. My talk went smoothly and I had some nice discussions afterwards with a few people who were doing related work.

Re-union with old friends is always great fun. Meeting fellow graduates from U of M is always joyful. I haven't seen most of my friends from HKUST for quite some time. Many of them are now faculty or researchers. I am very happy for their accomplishments. Good luck to all of them who are about to start their new job!

In the summer, I will be interning at IBM Almaden Research Center in San Jose, California. Given the number of UM (especially dbgroup) graduates in IBM, I believe I will feel right home. From end of June to early July, I will be at SIGMOD conference in Rhode Island. It would be a nice break from the internship work.