Homepage of Chengkai Li


	Chengkai Li Assistant Professor Innovative Databases and Information Systems Research (IDIR) Lab Department of Computer Science and Engineering The University of Texas at Arlington	Engineering Research Building (ERB) 652 500 UTA Boulevard Arlington, TX 76019-0015 Office Hours: Tu/Th 11-12am,3:30-4:30pm Phone: 817-272-0162 Email: Skype: WWW: http://ranger.uta.edu/~cli

[IDIR Lab] [Research] [Teaching] [Students] [Publications]

I am looking for B.S., M.S., Ph.D. students. Financial supports are available.
We have an NSF REU award that provides financial support to undergraduate students doing research. Interested students can email me for further details.
I am directing The Innovative Databases and Information Systems Research (IDIR) Lab
(September 2011) Thanks to HP for 2011 HP Labs Innovation Research Award.
(September 2011) Thanks to NSF for a new grant "SHF: Small: Testing Large-Scale Database-Centric Applications".
(January 2011) Our paper "Computational Journalism: A Call to Arms to Database Researchers" won the 3^rd place in best Outrageous Ideas and Vision (OIV) Track paper competition in CIDR 2011.
(September 2010) Thanks to NSF for funding our project "III: Small: EntityEngine: A Query Engine for Entity-Relationship Queries over Web Text".

Bio
I got my PhD degree in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, in October 2007. My Ph.D. advisor was Kevin Chen-Chuan Chang. I worked on the AIM and MetaQuerier projects, in the Database and Information Systems Laboratory. I received my B.S. and M.E. degrees in Computer Science from Department of Computer Science and Technology, Nanjing University, China, in 1997 and 2000, respectively. I interned at Bell Labs in the summer of 2002 and 2003 and at IBM Watson in the summer of 2006. I joined the CSE department of UTA in Fall 2007 as an assistant professor.

My wife, Fen Lu, is a system librarian at the UTA Library. She received an M.LIS degree from the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at UIUC in 2005, and an M.S. degree in Computer Science from the Oregon State University, in 2004. She graduated in 1997 with a B.S. degree in Computer Science from National University of Defense Technology (Changsha Institute of Technology), China.

Research Interests

My interests are in the areas of databases, web data management, data mining, and information retrieval, with an emphasis on making data retrieval and exploration in emerging applications more effective and efficient. In particular, I work on computational journalism, database exploration, database testing, entity search and query, OLAP and data warehousing, query processing and optimization, ranking and skyline queries, and Web search/mining/integration.

Funding

2011 HP Labs Innovation Research Award, Entity-Centric Querying of Enterprise Information for IT Management. Chengkai Li (PI). $40,000.
NSF Award #1117369, SHF: Small: Testing Large-Scale Database-Centric Applications. Christoph Csallner (PI), Leonidas Fegaras (co-PI), Chengkai Li (co-PI). $497,955. Sept. 2011-Aug. 2014.
NSF Award #1018865, IIS: Small: EntityEngine: A Query Engine for Entity-Relationship Queries over Web Text. Chengkai Li (PI), Gautam Das (co-PI). $499,713. Sept. 2010-Aug. 2013.
REU supplement to NSF Award #1018865. $16,000.
UTA REP: Mashing Up Information on the Web. Chengkai Li (PI). $10,000. Sept. 2008-Aug.2009.
I would also like to thank HP Labs China for inviting me to visit them in the Summer of 2010 and 2011 and covering the cost of my stay.

Ongoing Projects

Computational Journalism: Database and Data Mining Support for Computational Investigative Journalism
- Research Agenda [CIDR11]
- Prominent Streak Discovery [KDD11][KDD12]
Database Testing: Testing Large-Scale Database-Centric Applications.
- Database Application Testing [DBTest10]
- Testing MapReduce-Style Programs [FSE11]
- Optimization of MapReduce Queries [EDBT12]
WebEQ: Querying and Exploring Structured Information on the Web
- Entity-Relationship Query: [ACM TIST 2012] [CIKM10 demo] online demo
- Facetedpedia: [WWW10] [CIKM10 demo] online demo
Web Database Integration
- User- and Query-Dependent Ranking for Web Databases [IEEE TKDE]
- Query Formulation [ER09]
RankSQL: Ranking and Top-k Queries, Data Exploration
In my PhD work I built a "Google" for databases. The system, RankSQL, is built inside the kernel of a full-fledged DBMS, PostgreSQL. It enables intuitive, efficient, and robust data retrieval by ranking and mechanisms beyond ranking. It helps users to efficiently retrieve data by non-traditional fuzzy queries with soft criteria, and to explore what choices are available in databases and how they match the query criteria. This line of work has broad applications in many domains including E-commerce, Web search, multimedia retrieval, health data management, and bioinformatics.
ENABLING DATA RETRIEVAL: BY RANKING AND BEYOND (PhD dissertation)
RankSQL [SIGMOD05][VLDB05 demo]
Ranking Aggregates [SIGMOD06]
Ranking+Clustering [SIGMOD07]

Former Projects

Professional Services

Co-Vice General Chair: IPCCC 11
Program Co-Chair: IPCCC 10
Publications Chair: IPCCC 09
Program Committee: VLDB(13), ICDM(12,11,10,08), WISE(12), PAKDD(12,09), WAIM(12,11,10,05), WWW(11), ICDE(11 demo track), DBRank(11,10,08), IIWeb(11), SEDE(11), ICCCN(11), CIKM(10), ISDPE(10,07), KMIS(10), SNAS(09), WIDM(09), DSMM(09)
Journal Reviewer: ACM Transactions on Database Systems (TODS), ACM Transactions on Information Systems (TOIS), Distributed and Parallel Databases (DAPD), IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering (TKDE), IEEE Transactions on Multimedia (TMM), IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems (TPDS), Information Processing & Management (IPM), Information Systems, VLDB Journal
NSF Grant Review Panel
Czech Science Foundation Grant Reviewer
External Referee: DASFAA 04,03, DIVO 04, ICDE 08,07,06,05,03, M-PREF 07, SDM 07, KDD 08, SIGMOD 10,06,05, WebDB 05,04

Teaching
CSE4334/5334 Data Mining: Fall 12, Fall 11, Fall 10, Fall 09, Fall 08
CSE6339 Data Management and Analysis for Computational Journalism (Special Topics in Advanced Database Systems): Spring 12
CSE3330 Database I: Spring 12, Spring 11
CSE6339 Web Search, Mining, and Integration (Special Topics in Advanced Database Systems): Spring 11, Spring 10, Spring 09
CSE6339 Hot Topics in Data and Information Management (Special Topics in Advanced Database Systems): Spring 08
CSE3302 Programming Languages: Spring 08 (Co-taught with Weimin He), Fall 07

Current Students
PhD students:
    Naeemul Hassan
    Nandish Jayaram (co-advised with Ramez Elmasri)
    Afroza Sultana
    Ning Yan

MS students:
    Mahesh Gupta
    Jijo Philip
    Mahbubur Rahman

BS students:
    Feifan Meng
    Khuong Nguyen

Alumni
    Xiaonan Li
    Avinash Bharadwaj (MS thesis, December 2011, Copper Labs)
    Aditya Telang (Ph.D., May 2011, co-advised with Sharma Chakravarthy, IBM Research India)
    Jared Ashman (MS thesis, December 2010, Ambit Energy, Plano, TX)
    Ebrahim Cutlerywala (MS, December 2010, Google, Cambridge, MA)
    Quazi (Sunny) Hasan (MS thesis, December 2010, Dematic, New Berlin, WI)
    Angus Helm (BS, December 2010)
    Rakesh Ramegowda (MS, 2010)
    Aakash Tuli (BS, Spring 2010)
    Muhammad Safiullah (MS thesis, August 2008, Microsoft, Seattle, WA)

Publications

Book Chapters

XML Parsing, SAX/DOM. Chengkai Li. A regular entry in Encyclopedia of Database Systems, L. Liu and M. Tamer Özsu (editors), Springer, http://refworks.springer.com/database-systems, 2009. [PDF]

Refereed Journal Papers

Entity-Relationship Queries over Wikipedia. Xiaonan Li, Chengkai Li, Cong Yu. In ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology (ACM TIST), 3(4), 2012. [PDF]
One Size Does Not Fit All: Towards User- and Query-Dependent Ranking For Web Databases. Aditya Telang, Chengkai Li, Sharma Chakravarthy. In IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering (IEEE TKDE), 07 Feb. 2011. [PrePrint]
Structured Databases on the Web: Observations and Implications. K. C.-C. Chang, B. He, C. Li, M. Patel, and Z. Zhang. SIGMOD Record, 33(3):61-70, September 2004. [PDF]

Refereed Conference Papers

On “One of the Few” Objects. You Wu, Pankaj K. Agarwal, Chengkai Li, Jun Yang, Cong Yu. In Proceedings of the 18th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD 2012), pages -, Beijing, China, August 2012. (Oral Presentation, Acceptance Rate /755=%) [PDF] [Slides]
An Optimization Framework for Map-Reduce Queries. Leonidas Fegaras, Chengkai Li, Upa Gupta. In Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Extending Database Technology (EDBT 2012), pages -, Berlin, Germany, March 2012. (Acceptance Rate 43/193=22.5%) [PDF] [Slides]
Testing MapReduce-Style Programs. Christoph Csallner, Leonidas Fegaras, Chengkai Li. In Proceedings of the 19th ACM SIGSOFT Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering (FSE 2011), New Ideas Track, pages 504-507, Szeged, Hungary, September 2011. (Acceptance Rate 11/43=25.6%) [PDF] [Slides]
Prominent Streak Discovery in Sequence Data. Xiao Jiang, Chengkai Li, Ping Luo, Min Wang, Yong Yu. In Proceedings of the 17th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD 2011), pages 1280-1288, San Diego, California, USA, August 2011. (Poster Rresentation, Acceptance Rate 125/714=17.5%) [PDF] [Poster]
Computational Journalism: A Call to Arms to Database Researchers. Sarah Cohen, Chengkai Li, Jun Yang, Cong Yu. In Proceedings of the 5th Biennial Conference on Innovative Data Systems Research (CIDR 2011), pages 148-151, Asilomar, California, USA, January 2011. (3^rd place in best Outrageous Ideas and Vision (OIV) Track paper competition) [PDF] [Slides]
Facetedpedia: Enabling Query-Dependent Faceted Search for Wikipedia. Ning Yan, Chengkai Li, Senjuti B. Roy, Rakesh Ramegowda, Gautam Das. In Proceedings of the 19th ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM 2010), pages 1927-1928, Toronto, Canada, October 2010. Demonstration description. [PDF]
EntityEngine: Answering Entity-Relationship Queries using Shallow Semantics. Xiaonan Li, Chengkai Li, Cong Yu. In Proceedings of the 19th ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM 2010), pages 1925-1926, Toronto, Canada, October 2010. Demonstration description. [PDF]
Facetedpedia: Dynamic Generation of Query-Dependent Faceted Interfaces for Wikipedia. Chengkai Li, Ning Yan, Senjuti Basu Roy, Lekhendro Lisham, Gautam Das. In Proceedings of the 19th International World Wide Web Conference (WWW 2010), pages 651-660, Raleigh, North Carolina, USA, April 2010. (Acceptance Rate 104/743=14%) [PDF] [Slides]
Query-By-Keywords (QBK): Query Formulation Using Semantics and Feedback. AdityaTelang, Sharma Chakravarthy, and Chengkai Li. In Proceedings of the 2009 International Conference on Conceptual Modeling (ER 2009), pages 191-204, 2009. (Acceptance Rate 31/162=19%) [PDF]
Querying for Information Integration: How to go from an Imprecise Intent to a Precise Query? AdityaTelang, Sharma Chakravarthy, and Chengkai Li. In Proceedings of the 2008 International Conference on Management of Data (COMAD 2008), pages 245-248, Bombay, India, December 2008. [PDF]
Supporting Ranking and Clustering as Generalized Order-By and Group-By. Chengkai Li, Min Wang, Lipyeow Lim, Haixun Wang, and Kevin Chen-Chuan Chang. In Proceedings of the 2007 ACM SIGMOD Conference (SIGMOD 2007), pages 127-138, Beijing, China, June 2007. (Acceptance Rate 69/480=14%) [PDF] [Slides]
Supporting Ad-hoc Ranking Aggregates. Chengkai Li, Kevin Chen-Chuan Chang, and Ihab F. Ilyas. In Proceedings of the 2006 ACM SIGMOD Conference (SIGMOD 2006), pages 61-72, Chicago, Illinois, USA, June 2006. (Acceptance Rate 58/446=13%) [PDF] [Slides]
RankSQL: Supporting Ranking Queries in Relational Database Management Systems. Chengkai Li, Mohamed Ali, Kevin Chen-Chuan Chang, and Ihab F. Ilyas. In Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Very Large Data Bases (VLDB 2005), pages 1342-1345, Trondheim, Norway, August 2005. Demonstration description. (Acceptance Rate 29/69=42%) [PDF]
RankSQL: Query Algebra and Optimization for Relational Top-k Queries. Chengkai Li, Kevin Chen-Chuan Chang, Ihab F. Ilyas, and Sumin Song. In Proceedings of the 2005 ACM SIGMOD Conference (SIGMOD 2005), pages 131-142, Baltimore, Maryland, USA, June 2005. (Acceptance Rate 65/431=15%) [PDF] [Slides]
Composing XSL Transformations with XML Publishing Views. Chengkai Li, Philip Bohannon, Henry F. Korth, and PPS Narayan. In Proceedings of the 2003 ACM SIGMOD Conference (SIGMOD 2003), pages 515-526, San Diego, California, USA, June 2003. (Acceptance Rate 52/342=15%) [PDF] [Slides]
Relational On-Line Exchange with XML. Philip Bohannon, Xin (Luna) Dong, Sumit Ganguly, Henry F. Korth, Chengkai Li, P.P.S. Narayan, and Pradeep Shenoy. In Proceedings of the 2003 ACM SIGMOD Conference (SIGMOD 2003), pages 673, San Diego, California, USA, June 2003. Demonstration description. [PDF]

Refereed Workshop Papers

Formalization of 2-D Spatial Ontology and OWL/Protégé Realization. Kulsawasd Jitkajornwanich, Ramez Elmasri, Chengkai Li and John Mcenery. In Proceedings of the 3rd International Workshop on Semantic Web Information Management (SWIM 2011), pages -, Athens, Greece, June 2011. (Co-located with SIGMOD 2011) [PDF]
XML Query Optimization in Map-Reduce. Leonidas Fegaras, Chengkai Li, Upa Gupta, Jijo Philip. In Proceedings of the 14th International Workshop on the Web and Databases (WebDB 2011), pages -, Athens, Greece, June 2011. (Co-located with SIGMOD 2011) (Acceptance Rate 12/43=27.9%) [PDF]
Entity-Relationship Queries over Wikipedia. Xiaonan Li, Chengkai Li, Cong Yu. In Proceedings of the 2nd International Workshop on Search and Mining User-generated Contents (SMUC 2010), pages 21-28, Toronto, Canada, October 2010. (Co-located with CIKM 2010) (Acceptance Rate 8/32=25%) [PDF] [Slides]
Dynamic Symbolic Database Application Testing. Chengkai Li, Christoph Csallner. In Proceedings of the Third International Workshop on Testing Database Systems (DBTest 2010), pages -, Indianapolis, Indiana, USA, June 2010. (Co-located with SIGMOD 2010) [PDF] [Slides]
Query Routing: Finding Ways in the Maze of the Deep Web. Govind Kabra, Chengkai Li, and Kevin Chen-Chuan Chang. In Proceedings of the International Workshop on Challenges in Web Information Retrieval and Integration (WIRI 2005), Tokyo, Japan, April 2005. (In conjunction with ICDE 2005) (Acceptance Rate 14/47=30%) [PDF]

Technical Reports

A Structure-Driven Yield-Aware Web Form Crawler: Building a Database of Online Databases. Bin He, Chengkai Li, David Killian, Mitesh Patel, Yuping Tseng, and Kevin Chen-Chuan Chang. UIUCDCS-R-2006-2752, Department of Computer Science, UIUC, July 2006. [PDF]
Discovering Attribute Locality across the Deep Web: an Ordering-Based Approach. Chengkai Li and Kevin Chen-Chuan Chang. UIUCDCS-R-2003-2323, Department of Computer Science, UIUC, February 2003. [PDF]

Dissertations

Enabling Data Retrieval: By Ranking and Beyond. Chengkai Li. Ph.D. Dissertation. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2007. [PDF]

Datasets

The UIUC Web Integration Repository. Kevin Chen-Chuan Chang, Bin He, Chengkai Li, and Zhen Zhang. Department of Computer Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Invited Talks

Entity-Centric Query and Exploration over Web Text. [Slides]
HP Labs China, Beijing, China, August 2010.
Search the Database and Query the Web: Two Sides to the Story. [Slides]
Texas A&M University, College Station, TX, November 2008.
University of Texas at Dallas, Richardson, TX, October 2008.
IBM China, Beijing, China, June 2008.
Remin University, Beijing, China, June 2008.
Nanjing University, Beijing, China, June 2008.
Supporting Ranking and Clustering as Generalized Order-By and Group-By. [Slides]
Southern Methodist University, Dallas, TX, November 2007.
Beyond SQL: Structured Data Retrieval by Ranking. [Slides]
Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL, April 2007.
University of Texas at Arlington, Arlington, TX, March 2007.
Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, November 2006.
Indiana University, Bloomington, IN, November 2006.
Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago, IL, October 2006.
University of Texas at Arlington, Arlington, TX, September 2006.

Last Modified: 2011-01-18
Created: 2001-09-18 00:16:21
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