Alon Y. Halevy
Affiliate Professor, Computer Science and Engineering
(was Alon Levy until 2000)

Welcome Bio Current Research Teaching Presentations Students Funding and Awards Entrepreneurial Activities Photos and Family

I am currently at Google Inc. in Mountain View, California. Until December 2006, I was a professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington.

I'm no longer maintaining this site. It contains all my publications and activities through 2006. You can see my new (and evolving) homepage . Recently, I've gone Web 2.0, so I'm planning to write mostly on my blog.

The main goal of my research is to build tools that simplify people's access to data, typically in complex data environments which I refer to as dataspaces. To support this goal, my areas of research are integrating data from multiple (structured and unstructured) sources, machine learning approaches to resolving schema heterogeneity, personal information management, management of XML data, and query processing and optimization. I am very interested in the combination of techniques from Artificial Intelligence and Data Management. I believe that the data management community should shift its focus away from enterprise computing and consider consumer-facing applications. Dataspaces offer an abstraction at which problems relevant to consumer-facing applications can be addressed. My two current main research projects are the Semex Personal Information Management System, and using Machine Learning for resolving semantic heterogeneity.

As a profeessor I taught graduate and undergraduate courses in data management, and believe in introducing some of my research ideas as early as I can in the curriculum (see a paper I wrote on my data management course.) I am also an entrepreneur in my free time. I have founded two companies: Nimble Technology (Enterprise Information Integration) and Transformic (Deep Web Search).

In my other free time, you can either see me at the gym under a big pile of weights, jogging, in a movie cinema, trying to explain to a barista how to prepare a double split-shot 2% wet cappuccino, or, more likely, with my wife Oriana and our two kids Karina and Kasper.

Recent updates:

  • Elected ACM Fellow, 2006.
  • The Information Manifold paper received the VLDB 2006 10-year Best Paper Award (i.e., the most influencial paper from VLDB 1996). In honor of the occasion, we wrote a 10-year retrospective on data integration research and industry.
  • I've recently given a few keynotes on dataspaces:
  • My PODS 2006 paper on dataspaces outlines a specific list of technical challenges relating to dataspaces.
  • Kasper Elior was born on October 26th, 2005!
  • The first paper on dataspaces is out. It appeared in the December 2005 issue of the SIGMOD Record. Dataspaces (and their associated Dataspace Support Platforms) offer a new abstraction for considering data management problems that arise in consumer-facing applications, such as web search, personal information management, the "smart" home, digital libraries and scientific data management.
  • I recently decided to learn JavaScript, and this web site is the result. (The old one is still available).
  • Our demonstration of the Semex System was chosen as one of the top 3 demos of SIGMOD 2005.

Search my publications: (My DBLP entry has the complete list.)
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Contact Information

Email: Mailing address:
Paul Allen Center for Computer Science and Engineering,
Room 576
Mailstop 352350,
University of Washington,
Seattle, WA, 98195
Phones:
Google: (650) 253-2574
UW: (206) 543-8099
UW Fax: (206) 543-2969
My program manager is Dan Dembiczak, dand@cs.washington.edu