Bill Howe

Projects

Publications

Talks

Bio

Service

Background

News

• I'm teaching a UWEO Course on Data-Intensive Computing in the Cloud

Students

Research

Research Topics

Management of very large or very complex science data. Data-intensive scalable computing, scientific databases, visualization, mashups, integration of ad hoc science data.

Read more...

SQLShare: Database-as-a-Service for Long Tail Science
Informed by the dataspace abstraction proposed by Halevy, Franklin, and Maier, we are devleoping a platform for ad hoc databases called SQLShare that allows a user to bootstrap a collaborative database environment just by uploading data, writing queries, and sharing the results.

Our approach is to provide a basic system for querying data in the cloud (using Microsoft SQL Azure), then explore a set of smart services to streamline and automate analysis. Specifically: 1) queries are saved as views and can be shared with others for collaborative analysis, 2) we derive automatic starter queries directly from the data to bootstrap analysis, 3) we derive dashboards (``mashups'') directly from the data to automate visual analysis, 4) we are working to translate English fragments into SQL fragments to assist SQL novices, and 5) we are using previous work here at UW on SQL Autocomplete features.

Our motivation is long tail science. In contrast to "big science" projects such as the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope and the Large Hadron Collider, the challenge faced in the long tail of science is not only about data volume, but about data complexity. Projects in oceanography or the life sciences may involve cleaning and integrating data from hundreds of heterogeneous data sources. Although sheer scale is not typically the defining feature of these data sources, the volumes involved are not insignificant: In the life sciences, for example, a modern short-read sequencer can generate a terabyte per day. At the University of Washington, there are approximately ten of these sequencers used on campus, and 20 more are scheduled to be purchased in the next few years. Low-cost, high-throughput mass spectrometry, microarray, and flow cytometry are similarly poised to produce exponential growth in data volumes in the next few years. Read more....

This project is supported by a Moore Foundation Grant and a 2010 Jim Gray Seed Grant from Microsoft Research.

Parallel Datalog on new Computing Platforms
Building on our work on HaLoop, we are developing a Datalog interface to massively parallel platforms including HaLoop/Hadoop, the Cray XMT, and Microsoft's Daytona Platform on the Azure cloud. The Cray XMT supports massive multi-threading --- millions of simultaneous threads accessing shared memory at low latency --- eliminating dependence on a deep cache hierarchy for performance. PNNL is exploring the XMT as a platform for a Graph Database. While the XMT has proven capabilities in graph processing, a general-purpose semantic database necessarily involves "conventional" computation in addition to massively thread-parallel computation. A query language to insulate the user from this heterogeneity, transparently splitting a query into conventional and XMT components, does not exist. We are designing a prototype language with this property.

GridFields: Algebraic Manipulation of Unstructured Meshes
The large datasets produced by simulations typically have a grid structure that is not amenable to storage within traditional database systems. We've developed an algebra of GridFields that allows convenient manipulation of grid-structured datasets much in the way the relational algebra allows convenient manuipulation of table-structured data. This work originated in the context of CMOP, the NSF Science and Tehcnology Center for Coastal Margin Observation and Prediction.

This work is supported by a subcontract from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute via the NSF-funded Ocean Observatories Initiaitve and an NSF EAGER award.

Data Pricing I am a Co-PI on the Data Pricing project.

SciDB
I am on the Science Advisory Board for the SciDB project, representing requirements from theenvironmental modeling community.

Teaching

• Parallel Visualization on Large Clusters Using Mapreduce.
  Huy Vo, Brian Summa, J. Comba, Juliana Freire, Bill Howe, Claudio Silva, and Valerio Pascucci.
  In Proceedings of Large-Scale Data Analysis and Visualization (LDAV), 2011.
• Data Markets in the Cloud: An Opportunity for the Database Community
  Magda Balazinska, Bill Howe, Dan Suciu
  VLDB 2011 (vision track) (2nd place best paper award)
• Database-as-a-Service for Long Tail Science
  Bill Howe, Garret Cole, Emad Souroush, Paraschos Koutris, Alicia Key, Nodira Khoussainova, Leilani Battle
  SSDBM 2011
• Automatic Example Queries for Ad Hoc Databases
  Bill Howe, Garret Cole, Nodira Khoussainova, Leilani Battle
  SIGMOD 2011 (demo)
• HaLoop: Efficient Iterative Data Processing On Large Clusters (pdf)
  YingYi Bu, Bill Howe, Magdalena Balazinska, Michael Ernst
  PVLDB, 3(1) (VLDB 2010) (selected for Best of VLDB 2010 issue of VLDB Journal)
• SQL is Dead; Long Live SQL: Lightweight Query Services for Long Tail Science
  Bill Howe, Garret Cole
  Microsoft eScience Workshop 2010
• Scalable clustering algorithm for N-body simulations in a shared-nothing cluster(pdf)
  YongChul Kwon, Dylan Nunley, Jeffrey P. Gardner, Magdalena Balazinska, Bill Howe and Sarah Loebman
  SSDBM 2010
• Client + Cloud: Seamless Architectures for Visual Data Analytics in the Ocean Sciences (pdf)
  Keith Grochow, Bill Howe, Roger Barga, Ed Lazowska
  22nd International Statistical and Scientific Database Management Conference (SSDBM 2010)
• Skew-Resistant Parallel Processing of Feature-Extracting Scientific User-Defined Functions (pdf)
  YongChul Kwon, Magdalena Balazinska, Bill Howe, and Jerome Rolia
  SOCC 2010.
• Analyzing Massive Astrophysical Datasets: Can Pig/Hadoop or a Relational DBMS Help?
  Sarah Loebman, Dylan Nunley, YongChul Kwon, Bill Howe, Magdalena Balazinska, and Jeffrey P. Gardner
  IASDS 2009
• Scientific Mashups: Runtime-Configurable Data Product Ensembles (pdf)
  Bill Howe, Harrison Green-Fishback, David Maier
  21st International Statistical and Scientific Database Management Conference (SSDBM 2009)
• End-to-End e-Science: Integrating Workflow, Query, Visualization, and Provenance at an Ocean Observatory
  Bill Howe, Peter Lawson, Renee Bellinger, Erik Anderson, Emanuele Santos, Juliana Freire, Carlos Scheidegger, Antonio Baptista, Claudio Silva (pdf)
  IEEE eScience Conference (eScience 2008)
• Smoothing the ROI Curve for Scientific Data Management Applications (pdf) Bill Howe, David Maier, Laura Bright
  Third Biennial Conference on Innovative Data Systems Research (CIDR 2007)
• Algebraic Manipulation of Scientific Datasets (extended)
  Bill Howe, David Maier
  VLDB Journal, 14(4), November 2005
• Querying and Visualizing Gridded Datasets for e-Science (pdf) (quality color pdf handout) (smaller bw pdf handout)
  Bill Howe, David Maier
  21st International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE 2005) (demo)
  
• Retrofitting a Data Model to an Existing Environmental Repository (pdf)
  Bill Howe, David Maier
  17th International Statistical and Scientific Database Management Conference (SSDBM 2005)
  
• Algebraic Manipulation of Scientific Datasets (pdf)
  Bill Howe, David Maier
  30th International Conference on Very Large Data Bases (VLDB 2004) (one of four selected for Best of VLDB 2004 issue of VLDB Journal)
• Emergent Semantics: Towards Self-Organizing Scientific Metadata (pdf)
  Bill Howe, Kuldeep Tanna, Paul Turner, David Maier
  International Conference on Semantics for a Networked World (SFNW 2004), co-located with SIGMOD 2004.
  
• Logical and Physical Data Independence for Native Scientific Data Repositories (pdf)
  Bill Howe and David Maier
  IEEE Data Engineering Bulletin, 27(4), December 2004
  

• Dissertation (pdf)
• Thesis Defense, presented December 8th, 2006.

All movies will appear as still images by default. If you want the movies to play, download download them, unzip them in the same directory as the presentation, and make sure you open the presentation wth the correct working directory (i.e., by double-clicking the file rather than by using File->Open.)

• Advancing Declarative Query for Data-Intensive Science, Invited talk, Indiana University, March 2012
• Advancing Declarative Query for Data-Intensive Science, Invited talk, Berkeley, March 2012
• Speculating on Scientific Collaboration Futures", Panel talk at SSDBM 2011, Portland OR.
• Data-Intensive Scalable Science: Beyond MapReduce, Invited talk, University of Utah, May 2010.
• Data-Intensive Scalable Science: Beyond MapReduce, Invited talk, PNNL, June 2010.
• Data-Intensive Scalable Science: Beyond MapReduce, Invited talk, University of Utah, May 2010.
• Visual Data Analytics in the Cloud for Exploratory Science, Invited Talk, Tableau, Inc., May 2010.
• Research Dataspaces: Pay-as-you-go Integration and Analysis, Invited talk, HIV Enterprise Data Management Meeting, May 2010.
• Scalable Data Analysis Overview, lecture to Randy Leveque's High Performance Computing class on MapReduce, Hadoop, and relational databases. May 2009.
• Smoothing the ROI curve for Scientific Data Management Applications, presented at CIDR 2007, January 17th, 2006.
• Thesis Defense, presented December 8th, 2006.
• Educated Guessing, an informal talk given to undergraduates at Clark Atlanta University on February 20, 2006.
• Downloading the World: Middleware for Computational Science, a talk on GridFields given while visiting Georgia Tech on February 21, 2006.
• GridFields: Algebraic Manipulation of Scientific Datasets, presented September 3, 2004 at VLDB 2004 in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
• Emergent Semantics: Towards Self-Organizing Scientific Metadata, presented June 2004 at SFNW 2004 in Paris France (co-located with SIGMOD 2004)
• GridField Results, presented internally, November 18, 2003

• Program Committee, PVLDB 2012-2013
• Demo Co-chair, SSDBM 2013
• Program Committee, ScienceCloud 2012
• Chair, Workshop on HPC meets Databases, co-located with Supercomputing 2011
• Editorial Board, Journal of Data Semantics
• Organizing Committee, XLDB 2011
• Program Committee, LDAV 2011
• Program Committee, ScienceCloud 2011
• Co-Chair, Workshop on Array Databases
• Registration Chair, SSDBM 2011
• Program Committee, SSDBM 2011
• Demonstrations Program Committee, SIGMOD 2011
• Program Committee, EDBT 2010
• Program Committee, SSDBM 2010
• Program Committee, IIMAS Workshop, 2008
• Reviewer, VLDB Journal, 2007
• Program Committee, dg.o 2006
• Program Committee, dg.o 2005
• Demonstrations Program Committee, SIGMOD 2005
• Student Session Program Committee, dg.o 2004

Phd, Computer Science, Portland State University, 2006
BS, Industrial and Systems Engineering, Georgia Tech, 1999

I've been working with databases since 1995 when I worked for Delta Airlines as a co-op in their Technical Operations facility. When I graduated from Georgia Tech, I went to work for Deloitte Consulting designing and building enterprise client-server applications, specifically Customer Relatonship Management (CRM) systems with Siebel. After Deloitte and before graduate school, I worked as an independent contractor at Microsoft and other companies as diverse as newly deregulated telecommunications carriers to providers of oil field exploration services.