Christopher Re: 2014 Plenary Session

Tuesday, April 15, 2014
Location: Fisher Conference Center, Arrillaga Alumni Center

"DeepDive: A Data System for Macroscopic Science"
10:45am

Abstract:
Many pressing questions in science are macroscopic, as they require that a scientist integrate information from many sources of data, often expressed in natural languages or in graphics; these forms of media are fraught with imprecision and ambiguity and so difficult for machines to understand. This talk describes DeepDive, a new type of statistical extraction and integration system to cope with these problems. For some tasks in paleobiology, DeepDive-based systems are surpassing human volunteers in data quantity, recall, and precision. This talk will describe DeepDive's technical core of classical data management techniques as well as its new techniques for efficient statistical computation that we hope will enable more macroscopic science.

Bio:

Christopher (Chris) Re is an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science at Stanford University and a Robert N. Noyce Family Faculty Scholar. The goal of his work is to enable users and developers to build applications that more deeply understand and exploit data. Chris received his PhD from the University of Washington in Seattle under the supervision of Dan Suciu. For his PhD work in probabilistic data management, Chris received the SIGMOD 2010 Jim Gray Dissertation Award. He then spent four wonderful years on the faculty of the University of Wisconsin, Madison before moving to Stanford in 2013. In his time as a faculty member, he helped discover the first join algorithm with worst-case optimal running time, which won the best paper at PODS 2012, and develop the formal underpinnings of and architectures to support large-scale statistical analytics frameworks. In addition, work from his group has been incorporated into scientific efforts like the IceCube neutrino detector and PaleoDeepDive, and into products from Oracle, Pivotal, and Cloudera's Impala. He received an NSF CAREER Award in 2011 and an Alfred P. Sloan fellowship in 2013.