Thursday
April 24
2014

Alon Halevy

Google Research

Structured Data in Web Search

3:00pm, Ryerson 251

For the first time since the emergence of the Web, structured data is playing a key role in search engines and is therefore being collected via a concerted effort. Much of this data is being extracted from the Web, which contains vast quantities of structured data on a variety of domains, such as hobbies, products and reference data. Moreover, the Web provides a platform that encourages publishing more data sets from governments and other public organizations. The Web also supports new data management opportunities, such as effective crisis response, data journalism and crowd-sourcing data sets.

I will describe some of the efforts we are conducting at Google to collect structured data, filter the high-quality content, and serve it to our users. These efforts include providing Google Fusion Tables, a service for easily ingesting, visualizing and integrating data, mining the Web for high-quality HTML tables, and contributing these data assets to Google's other services.

Alon Halevy heads the Structured Data Management Research group at Google. Prior to that, he was a professor of Computer Science at the University of Washington in Seattle, where he founded the database group. In 1999, Dr. Halevy co-founded Nimble Technology, one of the first companies in the Enterprise Information Integration space, and in 2004, Dr. Halevy founded Transformic, a company that created search engines for the deep web, and was acquired by Google. Dr. Halevy is a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery, received the the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) in 2000, and was a Sloan Fellow (1999-2000). He received his Ph.D in Computer Science from Stanford University in 1993 and his Bachelors from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Halevy is also a coffee culturalist and published the book "The Infinite Emotions of Coffee", published in 2011 and a co-author of the book "Principles of Data Integration", published in 2012.

Host: Ian Foster