Microsoft Summer Institute 2005

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The University of Washington / Microsoft Research Summer Institute on "Infrastructure for Managing Imprecise Information in Relational Database Systems" will be held July 31 - August 4, 2005 (Sunday-Thursday), in the Pacific Northwest. It will be the ninth in an annual series of summer workshops on various topics jointly sponsored by the University of Washington and Microsoft Research (see http://www.cs.washington.edu/mssi/ for a list of previous institutes).

The premise underlying this workshop is that there is imprecise information that needs to be handled in many scenarios, including in enterprise data integration, personal information management systems, and sensor networks. The standard approach in today's systems is to deal with such impreciseness "outside" the database management system, i.e, in middleware or in tools. As imprecise information becomes a significant part of the data that we need to use for consumer and business applications, it is imperative that we reexamine the question if database management system infrastructure can be extended effectively to reduce the cost of dealing with imprecise information entirely at the application/middleware level.

Currently, our plan is to study the following four dimensions of the problem:

• 1) Applications that consume such an infrastructure - e.g. sensor networks, personal information management, product support, integration of scientific databases.
• 2) New foundations - e.g. probabilistic database (conceptual model and query processing), top-k answers (query processing).
• 3) Essential Tools - e.g. de-duplication, record linkage, lineage tracing.
• 4) Impact of Text - e.g. Automated Ranking, Information Extraction.

The goal of this summer institute is twofold. The first goal is to bring together researchers and practitioners to discuss the current state of the art. The second goal is to identify and formulate the data management challenges arising from imprecisions in data. The meeting will consist of presentations, panel discussions, and break-out group sessions.

The workshop will take place at the Salish Lodge and Spa in the Cascade foothills just 30 minutes east of Seattle. We will kick off the workshop with a dinner and reception on Sunday evening, July 31.

Attendee Biographies (Word Document)

	Computer Science & Engineering University of Washington Box 352350 Seattle, WA  98195-2350 (206) 543-1695 voice, (206) 543-2969 FAX [comments to Kay Beck-Benton]