Ben's blog

Spreadsheets in Google

2009-06-11T16:30:00.008-04:00

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.

Recent update: ICDE trip and summer plan

2009-04-27T17:12:00.005-04:00

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.

Congratulations to our new PhD, Dr. Jayapandian!

2008-12-10T00:52:00.014-05:00

Today my friend Magesh, or I should call, Dr. Jayapandian, successfully defended his thesis, "Automated Creation of Database Forms". Simply put, his work can automatically generate smart and usable search forms from a database schema (optionally data and queries) with little or no human intervention. This can either completely automate the process of form creation, or provide an initial design which humans can customize. For more details, I recommend reading his VLDB'08 paper.

Magesh is an amazing guy. Incredibly nice person, thoughtful, smart, funny, and hard-working. He is often the last to leave the lab at night and first to come in the morning. He is also the guy who brings a cake for almost everybody else's birthday or other special occasions.

I am very happy that he is finally on the other end of the tunnel, and I wish him the best for all future endeavors. I am going to miss you, my friend.

Don't be a jerk - the takeway from the talk "how to get research funding"

2008-12-04T22:48:00.003-05:00

Today I attended a very informative and entertaining talk given by Prof. John Laird. The theme is about how to get research funding from various government agencies and industry. I think I can summarize what I remembered here, beside the glaring title of this post:

be a low-maintenance, thoughtful, responsible, and useful team player, no matter it's to your program manager or collaborator (or the way John put it, "don't be a jerk")
do good research
make yourself known to the field

"Minority-report" interface

2008-11-15T11:47:00.009-05:00

Tom Cruise has a nice computer interface to play with in the movie "minority report". Today this has become a reality. Note that it's more than multi-touch. It recognizes spatial gestures. I can't help thinking, what does this imply for user interface and usability research?

g-speak overview 1828121108 from john underkoffler on Vimeo.

Election

2008-11-05T13:33:00.000-05:00

Honor competition

2008-10-27T00:37:00.013-04:00

Last Friday I participated the CSE graduate student honor competition, with a lot of help from my great advisor and fabulous labmates. My 2nd place in the competition really didn't do the justice to the help they gave me. If I have learned anything from this competition, they are: 1) I have a great advisor and wonderful lab-mates, 2) if you will present a talk to a general audience, practice with a general audience first, and 3) speakly clearly and slowly. The 2nd point is really what I missed. Many things I thought were easy were in fact not obvious to the audience, and I was too fast in speaking for some people to catch up.

Chinese calligraphy

2008-09-29T01:38:00.005-04:00

What happened?

2008-08-21T22:59:00.001-04:00

End of an era

2008-08-18T20:58:00.003-04:00

Today I said goodbye to a lab-mate and good friend who just graduated. In the very last 5 minutes, I said, with some sorrow, "with you gone, it's the end of an era".

She said, "you mean, the dinosaur era?"

Oh, we will miss you, for all the fun time you brought us!

Stanford infoblog

2008-08-04T11:30:00.003-04:00

It's a blog by Stanford InfoLab. I really like it, and I hope more and more DB groups will do the same.

http://infoblog.stanford.edu/

Ann Arbor - healthiest town voted by AARP

2008-08-03T23:04:00.003-04:00

AARP stands for American Association of Retired Persons. Here is a link to their selection. It's never too early to plan your retirement, eh?

Google Protocol Buffers

2008-07-08T20:28:00.003-04:00

Google just released its data interchange protocol. Sounds like a simple and efficient way for exchanging data between programs. It works with major languages. Now, writing objects, however you define them, to file and reading them back becomes much simpler. I haven't tried it but the introduction already convinced me.

Hello world!

2008-07-07T21:50:00.001-04:00

First post in the new blog. If not for Live space's MSN notification function, I would have migrated here a long time ago. Finally I was pushed over the edge and did it. So this is the new place I would ramble on little things I do or think about.

Today is also the beginning of my summer workout. It turns out we don't treasure things that come free - I have to pay for the gym membership in the summer in order to go exercise. Well, I think it also has something to do with the snowy weather in winter. From today I would go everyday except Sundays. Hopefully by the end of the summer I would be able to see some changes in myself.