Michael J. Cafarella

Email: username mjc, found at cs dot washington dot edu. Physical mail: Mike Cafarella University of Washington Department of Computer Science and Engineering Box 352350 Seattle, WA 98195-2350 Office: 482 Allen Center

I am a last-year graduate student at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington. My research interests are databases, information retrieval and extraction, and machine learning/data mining. I am particularly interested in extracting and managing Web data.

I am looking for positions in both academia and industrial research, to start in the fall of 2009. I have accepted a faculty position at the University of Michigan!

My advisors are Oren Etzioni and Dan Suciu. I've collaborated with many fellow students, most recently with Michele Banko, Chris Re, and Nodira Khoussainova. (And, from other universities, Daisy Zhe Wang, Eugene Wu, and Yang Zhang.) I have also completed two research projects at Google with Alon Halevy.

I've earned degrees from Brown and the University of Edinburgh, Scotland.

Before grad school, I worked at Marimba (later bought by BMC) and Tellme Networks (later bought by Microsoft). I also costarted the Nutch and Hadoop open source search projects with Doug Cutting (but the demands of grad school have finally pushed me to emeritus status).

Recent news (6/11/09): The TextRunner project, which I started with Michele Banko and Oren Etzioni (and has since been carried forward by many others), has been picked up in MIT's Tech Review.

Publications

2009

• Extracting and Querying a Comprehensive Web Database. Michael Cafarella. Proceedings of the Conference on Innovative Data Systems Research (CIDR) 2009. Asilomar, CA.

2008

• Data Management Projects at Google. Michael Cafarella, Edward Chang, Andrew Fikes, Alon Halevy, Wilson Hsieh, Alberto Lerner, Jayant Madhavan, S. Muthukrishnan. SIGMOD Record, 37(1), 2008.
• Ontology-driven, Unsupervised Instance Population. Luke K. McDowell and Michael Cafarella. To appear, Journal of Web Semantics, 2008.
• Uncovering the Relational Web. Michael J. Cafarella, Alon Halevy, Yang Zhang, Daisy Zhe Wang, Eugene Wu. Proceedings of the Eleventh International Workshop on the Web and Databases (WebDB), June 2008. Vancouver, Canada.
• WebTables: Exploring the Power of Tables on the Web. Michael J. Cafarella, Alon Halevy, Yang Zhang, Daisy Zhe Wang, Eugene Wu. Proceedings of VLDB 2008, August 2008. Auckland, New Zealand.

2007

• Navigating Extracted Data with Schema Discovery. Michael J. Cafarella, Dan Suciu, Oren Etzioni. Proceedings of the Tenth International Workshop on the Web and Databases (WebDB), June 2007. Beijing, China.
• Structured Querying of Web Text: A Technical Challenge. Michael J. Cafarella, Christopher Re, Dan Suciu, Oren Etzioni, Michele Banko. Proceedings of the Conference on Innovative Data Systems Research (CIDR) 2007. Asilomar, CA.
• Open Information Extraction from the Web. Michele Banko, Michael J. Cafarella, Stephen Soderland, Matthew Broadhead, Oren Etzioni. Proceedings of the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI), January 2007. Hyderabad, India.

2006

• Structured Queries Over Web Text. Michael J. Cafarella, Oren Etzioni, Dan Suciu. IEEE Data Bulletin, December 2006, 29(4).
• Ontology-driven Information Extraction with OntoSyphon. Luke McDowell and Michael Cafarella. Fifth International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC 2006), November 2006.
• Machine Reading. Oren Etzioni, Michele Banko, Michael J. Cafarella. Proceedings of AAAI 2006.

2005

• KnowItNow: Fast, Scalable Information Extraction from the Web. Michael J. Cafarella, Doug Downey, Stephen Soderland, and Oren Etzioni. Proceedings of the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing. Vancouver, 2005.
• A Search Engine for Natural Language Applications. Michael J. Cafarella, Oren Etzioni. Proceedings of the 14th International World Wide Web Conference (WWW 2005).
• Unsupervised named-entity extraction from the Web: An experimental study. Oren Etzioni, Michael Cafarella, Doug Downey, Ana-Maria Popescu, Tal Shaked, Stephen Soderland, Daniel S. Weld, Alexander Yates. In Artificial Intelligence 165, pp. 91-134. 2005.

2004

• Methods for Domain-Independent Information Extraction from the Web: An Experimental Comparison. Oren Etzioni, Michael Cafarella, Doug Downey, Ana-Maria Popescu, Tal Shaked, Stephen Soderland, Daniel S. Weld, Alexander Yates. Proceedings of AAAI 2004.
• Web-scale Information Extraction in KnowItAll. Oren Etzioni, Michael Cafarella, Doug Downey, Stanley Kok, Ana-Maria Popescu, Tal Shaked, Stephen Soderland, Daniel S. Weld, Alexander Yates. Proceedings of the 13th International World Wide Web Conference (WWW 2004).
• Building Nutch: Open Source Search by Mike Cafarella and Doug Cutting. ACM Queue, 2(2), April 2004.

Teaching

Personal

• Best band ever: Shy Child
  
• Just for you, Google.