Keynote Talk 1: Distributed XML Processing

Prof. Tamer Ozsu, University of Waterloo, Canada

Abstract
XML is commonly used to store data and to exchange it between a variety of systems. While centralized querying of XML data is increasingly well understood, the same is not true in a scenario where the data is spread across multiple nodes in a distributed system. Since the size of XML data collections are increasing along with the heavy workloads that need to be evaluated on top of these collections, scaling a centralized solution is becoming increasingly difficult. A common method for addressing this issue is to distribute the data and parallelize query execution. This is well understood in relational databases, but the issues are more complicated in the case of XML data due to the complexity of the data representation and the flexibility of the schema definition. In this talk, I will introduce our new project to systematically study distributed XML processing issues. The talk will focus on data fragmentation and localization issues.
This is joint work with Patrick Kling.

Biography
M. Tamer Ozsu is Professor of Computer Science and University Research Chair at the University of Waterloo and Director of the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science. Prior to his current position, he was with the Department of Computing Science of the University of Alberta between 1984 and 2000. Dr. Ozsu's current research focuses on three areas: (a) Internet-scale data distribution, (b) multimedia data management, and (c) structured document management mainly within the context of XML query processing and optimization. Dr. Ozsu is on the editorial boards of ACM Computing Surveys, Distributed and Parallel Databases, World Wide Web Journal, Information Technology and Management. He is the Co-Editor-in-Chief of the forthcoming Encyclopedia of Database Systems and serves on the editorial boards of two Springer book series: Web Information Systems Engineering and Internet Technologies, and Advanced Information & Knowledge Processing. He chaired ACM Special Interest Group on Management of Data (SIGMOD) between 2001 and 2005 and was a trustee of the VLDB Endowment between 1996 and 2002. He was the Coordinating Editor-in-Chief of The VLDB Journal between 2001 and 2005. He currently serves on ACM Publications Board. He is a Fellow of ACM, a Senior Member of IEEE, and a member of Sigma Xi; he is the recipient of 2006 ACM SIGMOD Contributions Award, and the recipient of Distinguished Alumnus Award from Ohio State University, College of Engineering (2008).

Keynote Talk 2: Towards multi-modal extraction and summarization of conversations

Prof. Raymond Ng, University of British Columbia

Abstract
For many business intelligence applications, decision making depends critically on the information contained in all forms of informal text documents, such as emails, meeting summaries, attachments and web documents. For example, in a meeting, the topic of developing a new product was first raised. In subsequent follow-up emails, additional comments and discussions were added, which included links to web documents describing similar products in the market and user reviews on those products. A concise summary of this conversation is obviously valuable. However, existing technologies are inadequate in at least two fundamental ways. First, extracting conversations embedded in multi-genre documents is very challenging. Second, applying existing multi-document summarization techniques, where were designed mainly for formal documents, have proved to be highly ineffective when applied to informal documents like emails.

In this talk, we first review some of the earlier works done on extracting email conversations. We also give an overview of email summarization and meeting summarization methods. We then present several open problems that need to be solved for multi-modal extraction and summarization of conversations to become a reality. Last but not least, we specifically focus on extraction and summarization of sentiments in emails and blogs.

Biography
Dr. Raymond Ng is a professor in computer science at UBC. He is internationally renowned for his data mining studies. He has published over 100 journal and conference papers covering a broad range of topics. He has won Best Paper awards from the ACM SIGKDD conference and the ACM SIGMOD conference. For the past few years, Dr Ng is one of the editors of two top database journals worldwide: the VLDB Journal and the IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering. He was a general chair of ACM SIGMOD 2008 and a program chair of IEEE ICDE 2009.
URL: www.cs.ubc.ca/~rng

Keynote Talk 3: Semamtic Computing

Prof. Phillip C-y Sheu
University of California, Irvine, USA
Institute for Semantic Computing, USA
State Key Laboratory of Software Engineering (Wuhan University), China

Abstract
The field of Semantic Computing addresses the derivation and matching of the semantics of computational content to that of naturally expressed user intentions in order to retrieve, manage, manipulate or even create content, where “content” may be anything including video, audio, text, process, service, network, community, etc. This connection between content and user intentions is made via (1) Semantic Analysis, which analyzes content with the goal of converting it to machine processable semantics; (2) Semantic Integration, which integrates content and semantics from multiple sources; (3) Semantic Applications, which utilize content and semantics to solve problems; and (4) Semantic Interface, which interprets users' intentions expressed in natural language or other communicative forms. The reverse connection converts the intentions of users to create content via analysis and synthesis techniques. Semantic Computing applies technologies in natural language processing, data and knowledge engineering, software engineering, computer systems and networks, signal processing and pattern recognition, and combinations of the above to extract, access, transform and synthesize computational content and semantics of various types. This talk highlights the past, present and future of semantic computing.

Biography
Dr. Phillip C-Y. Sheu is currently a professor of EECS and Biomedical Engineering at the University of California, Irvine, and a visiting professor at the State Key Laboratory of Software Engineering (Wuhan University), China. He also serves as the Founding Director of the Institute for Semantic Computing, an international research organization that connects industry, government and academia to promote semantic computing technologies. He received his Ph.D. and M.S. degrees from the University of California at Berkeley in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science in 1986 and 1982, respectively. He has published two books: (1) Intelligent Robotic Planning Systems and (2) Software Engineering and Environment - An Object-Oriented Perspective, and more than 100 papers in object-relational data and knowledge engineering and their applications. His current research interests include semantic computing and complex biomedical systems. He is a fellow of IEEE, the founder of the IEEE International Conference on Semantic Computing, the founding Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Semantic Computing, and an editor of the forth-coming book “Semantic Computing” (Wiley/IEEE Press, Eds. P. C-Y Sheu, H. Yu, C.V. Ramamoorthy, A. Joshi and L. A. Zadeh, 2009).