Christopher Ré
Email: chrisre at cs.wisc.edu
Phone: (608) 263-5489
Office 4363
Office Hours: By Appointment
Department of Computer Sciences
University of Wisconsin-Madison
1210 W. Dayton St.
Madison, WI 53706-1685

  • About

  • News!

  • Students

  • Papers & Talks

  • Projects

  • Support

  • Courses

  • Bio

  • Hazy

  • I'm moving to Stanford (starting this summer). Bucky, you gave me a great home with great students, colleagues, and cheese curds. Thank you!


  • YouTube We're now mirroring our videos on a YouTube channel, HazyResearch. Feedback (positive and negative) is more than welcome.

    A few projects are already up:

    • GeoDeepDive With Shanan Peters (UW Geoscience) and Miron Livny's help from Condor, we are combining Macrostrat with DeepDive to (hopefully!) deliver value for Geoscientists. One key challenge is extracting all the measurement information that is reported in the literature, that is buried in the dark data of text, graphs, and figures. A demo video! Thank you to the National Science Foundation and Google for supporting this work. .
    • IceCube Mark Wellons, Ben Recht, and I have done some work with the IceCube Neutrino Detector. Mark's code now runs in the detector on the South Pole and is used on over 250 Million events per day. More details are in this video and this new video! Thank you to the IceCube Collaboration and UW Graduate School for their support of our work!

Upcoming Meetings and Talks
    • SILO. Ben Recht and Rob Nowak organize a great meeting.
    • PODS13. Dan Suciu and I are organizing a Colloquium on Theory Challenges in Big Data. Dan got a great set of speakers, and I'm excited to hear what they say!
    • GraphLab! Carlos has a company, and they are awesome. I'll be talking at their workshop.
    • BNCOD13 and DEOS. I'm giving an invited tutorial and talk, Dan Olteanu put together a very interesting BNCOD program and Wolfgang Gatterbauer put together a very fun DEOS program.
    • SPARC13. There is an awesome program with tutorials and incredible invited speakers (modulo a poorly chosen database guy...). I'm excited!
    • I'm giving a keynote at ECML-PKDD 2013!
    • I will be hanging out at Simons big data events at Cal. They promise to be off-the-charts good! Check 'em out!

Recent Papers, Manuscripts, and Funding News
    • VLDB 2013. We have two demos accepted to VLDB. Feature Selection in Enterprise Analytics: A Demonstration using an R-based Data Analytics System with Oracle people and Ringtail: Nowcasting Made Simple with Michigan people.
    • ACL 2013. Vidhya and Ce have an awesome new paper Understanding Tables in Context using Standard NLP Toolkits. We use this work in GeoDeepDive.
    • WebDB. Dolan Antenucci, Michael Cafarella, Margaret C. Levenstein, Matthew Shapiro and I have a paper Ringtail: Nowcasting Made Easy in WebDB 2013 with SIGMOD. (Formally called Automan)
    • StarAI. Sriraam Natarajan, José Picado, Tushar Khot, Kristian Kersting, Jude Shavlik, and my paper Using Commonsense Knowledge to Automatically Create (Noisy) Training Examples from Text has been accepted to StarAI with AAAI 2013.
    • ICRC. Mark Wellon's work on making a robust statistical detector for IceCube has been accepted to The International Cosmic Ray Conference 2013. This is joint work with the IceCube collaboration. Thanks, IceCube!
    • AirForce. Thank you to the Air Force for supporting Mathematical Foundations of Secure Computing Clouds; this is the hard work of Jordan Ellenberg (Math), Ben Recht (CS), Tom Ristenpart (CS), Rob Nowak (EE), and Steve Wright (CS).
    • MPC. Ben Recht and my paper about Matrix Factorization (Jellyfish) is accepted to Mathematical Programming Computation, the latest version of the paper is here which supersedes the 2011 version.
    • Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship. Thank you for your generous support of our research!
    • Oracle. Thank you for continuing support to support the Hazy Research group! This gift will be used to continue our work on feature engineering for structured analytics.
    • SIGMOD13: Towards High-Throughput Gibbs Sampling at Scale: A Study across Storage Managers. The paper is here. This is the latest version of our inference engine that runs GeoDeepDive and DeepDive. Code is here. A new video and code release is coming soon!
    • SIGMOD13 (demo). GeoDeepDive: Statistical Inference using Familiar Data-Processing Languages has been accepted as a demonstration! Roughly, it will be a live version of how to build the system in this video and this paper.
    • ACM Queue and CACM. The students of the Hazy group put together a manuscript describing their vision for Big Data Analytics Hazy: Making it Easier to Build and Maintain Big-data Analytics in ACM Queue and was invited to CACM
    A messy, incomplete list of old updates is here.

I am an assistant professor in the department of Computer Sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. My interests are theoretical and practical problems in data management. Details of my work can be found in my papers and my project website, Hazy. I believe that the future of computing is in data management. If you agree, are an outstanding student, and are beginning graduate work, then please send me an email.


  • I'm moving to Stanford (starting this summer). Bucky, you gave me a great home with great students, colleagues, and cheese curds. Thank you!


  • YouTube We're now mirroring our videos on a YouTube channel, HazyResearch. Feedback (positive and negative) is more than welcome.

    A few projects are already up:

    • GeoDeepDive With Shanan Peters (UW Geoscience) and Miron Livny's help from Condor, we are combining Macrostrat with DeepDive to (hopefully!) deliver value for Geoscientists. One key challenge is extracting all the measurement information that is reported in the literature, that is buried in the dark data of text, graphs, and figures. A demo video! Thank you to the National Science Foundation and Google for supporting this work. .
    • IceCube Mark Wellons, Ben Recht, and I have done some work with the IceCube Neutrino Detector. Mark's code now runs in the detector on the South Pole and is used on over 250 Million events per day. More details are in this video and this new video! Thank you to the IceCube Collaboration and UW Graduate School for their support of our work!

Upcoming Meetings and Talks
    • SILO. Ben Recht and Rob Nowak organize a great meeting.
    • PODS13. Dan Suciu and I are organizing a Colloquium on Theory Challenges in Big Data. Dan got a great set of speakers, and I'm excited to hear what they say!
    • GraphLab! Carlos has a company, and they are awesome. I'll be talking at their workshop.
    • BNCOD13 and DEOS. I'm giving an invited tutorial and talk, Dan Olteanu put together a very interesting BNCOD program and Wolfgang Gatterbauer put together a very fun DEOS program.
    • SPARC13. There is an awesome program with tutorials and incredible invited speakers (modulo a poorly chosen database guy...). I'm excited!
    • I'm giving a keynote at ECML-PKDD 2013!
    • I will be hanging out at Simons big data events at Cal. They promise to be off-the-charts good! Check 'em out!

Recent Papers, Manuscripts, and Funding News
    • VLDB 2013. We have two demos accepted to VLDB. Feature Selection in Enterprise Analytics: A Demonstration using an R-based Data Analytics System with Oracle people and Ringtail: Nowcasting Made Simple with Michigan people.
    • ACL 2013. Vidhya and Ce have an awesome new paper Understanding Tables in Context using Standard NLP Toolkits. We use this work in GeoDeepDive.
    • WebDB. Dolan Antenucci, Michael Cafarella, Margaret C. Levenstein, Matthew Shapiro and I have a paper Ringtail: Nowcasting Made Easy in WebDB 2013 with SIGMOD. (Formally called Automan)
    • StarAI. Sriraam Natarajan, José Picado, Tushar Khot, Kristian Kersting, Jude Shavlik, and my paper Using Commonsense Knowledge to Automatically Create (Noisy) Training Examples from Text has been accepted to StarAI with AAAI 2013.
    • ICRC. Mark Wellon's work on making a robust statistical detector for IceCube has been accepted to The International Cosmic Ray Conference 2013. This is joint work with the IceCube collaboration. Thanks, IceCube!
    • AirForce. Thank you to the Air Force for supporting Mathematical Foundations of Secure Computing Clouds; this is the hard work of Jordan Ellenberg (Math), Ben Recht (CS), Tom Ristenpart (CS), Rob Nowak (EE), and Steve Wright (CS).
    • MPC. Ben Recht and my paper about Matrix Factorization (Jellyfish) is accepted to Mathematical Programming Computation, the latest version of the paper is here which supersedes the 2011 version.
    • Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship. Thank you for your generous support of our research!
    • Oracle. Thank you for continuing support to support the Hazy Research group! This gift will be used to continue our work on feature engineering for structured analytics.
    • SIGMOD13: Towards High-Throughput Gibbs Sampling at Scale: A Study across Storage Managers. The paper is here. This is the latest version of our inference engine that runs GeoDeepDive and DeepDive. Code is here. A new video and code release is coming soon!
    • SIGMOD13 (demo). GeoDeepDive: Statistical Inference using Familiar Data-Processing Languages has been accepted as a demonstration! Roughly, it will be a live version of how to build the system in this video and this paper.
    • ACM Queue and CACM. The students of the Hazy group put together a manuscript describing their vision for Big Data Analytics Hazy: Making it Easier to Build and Maintain Big-data Analytics in ACM Queue and was invited to CACM
    A messy, incomplete list of old updates is here.
Index by year
2013   2012   2011   2010   2009   2008   2007   2006   2005   2004   2003   2002  

2013
  • Dolan Antenucci, Erdong Li, Shaobo Liu, Michael J. Cafarella, and Christopher Ré.
    • Ringtail: Nowcasting Made Easy.
    VLDB Demo 2013
  • Pradap Konda, Arun Kumar, Christopher Ré, and Vaishnavi Sashikanth.
    • Feature Selection in Enterprise Analytics: A Demonstration using an R-based Data Analytics System
    VLDB Demo 2013
  • Vidhya Govindaraju, Ce Zhang, and Christopher Ré
    • Understanding Tables in Context Using Standard NLP Toolkits
    ACL 2013 (Short Paper)
  • Dolan Antenucci, Michael Cafarella, Margaret C. Levenstein, Christopher Ré, and Matthew Shapiro
    • Ringtail: Nowcasting Made Easy
    WebDB 2013 with SIGMOD 2013
  • Sriraam Natarajan, Jose Picado, Tushar Khot, Kristian Kersting, Christopher Ré, and Jude Shavlik
    • Using Commonsense Knowledge to Automatically Create (Noisy) Training Examples from Text
    StarAI with AAAI 2013.
  • Mark Wellons, the IceCube Collaboration, Benjamin Recht, and Christopher Ré
    • Robust Statistics in IceCube Initial Muon Reconstruction
    International Cosmic Ray Conference 2013.
  • Benjamin Recht and Christopher Ré
    • Parallel Stochastic Gradient Algorithms for Large-Scale Matrix Completion
    Mathematical Programming Computation, 2013.
    Supercedes Optimization Online 2011 version
  • Ce Zhang and Christopher Ré.
    Towards High-Throughput Gibbs Sampling at Scale: A Study across Storage Managers.
    SIGMOD 2013.
  • Ce Zhang, Vidhya Govindaraju, Jackson Borchardt, Tim Foltz, Christopher Ré, and Shanan Peters.
    GeoDeepDive: Statistical Inference using Familiar Data-Processing Languages.
    SIGMOD 13 (demo).
  • Hung Q. Ngo, Dung T. Nguyen, Christopher Ré, and Atri Rudra.
    Instance Optimal Join Algorithms for Data in Indexes.
    Manuscript 2013.
  • Michael Anderson, Dolan Antenucci, Victor Bittorf, Matthew Burgess, Michael Cafarella, Arun Kumar, Feng Niu, Yongjoo Park, Christopher Ré, and Ce Zhang.
    Brainwash: A Data System for Feature Engineering (Vision Track)
    CIDR Conference 2013.
  • Arun Kumar, Feng Niu, and Christopher Ré
    Hazy: Making it Easier to Build and Maintain Big-data Analytics
    ACM Queue, 2013 (Invited to CACM March 2013 as well)


2012
  • Feng Niu, Ce Zhang, Christopher Ré, and Jude Shavlik.
    • Scaling Inference for Markov Logic via Dual Decomposition (Short Paper).
    ICDM, 2012.
  • Victor Bittorf, Benjamin Recht, Christopher Ré, and Joel A. Tropp.
    • Factoring nonnegative matrices with linear programs.
    NIPS 2012,
    Revised, Complete Version.
  • Joseph M. Hellerstein, Christopher Ré, Florian Schoppmann, Daisy Zhe Wang, Eugene Fratkin, Aleks Gorajek, Kee Siong Ng, Caleb Welton, Xixuan Feng, Kun Li, and Arun Kumar
    • The MADlib Analytics Library or MAD Skills, the SQL.
    PVLDB 2012
  • Arun Kumar and Christopher Ré
    • Probabilistic Management of OCR using an RDBMS
    PVLDB 2012,
    [Full Version]
  • Fei Chen, Xixuan Feng, Christopher Ré, and Min Wang
    • Optimizing Statistical Information Extraction Programs Over Evolving Text
    ICDE 2012,
    [Full Version]
  • Christopher Ré and Dan Suciu
    • Understanding cardinality estimation using entropy maximization
    ACM Trans. Database Syst. Volume 37, 2012, p. 6
  • Aaron Feng, Arun Kumar, Benjamin Recht, and Christopher Ré
    • Towards a Unified Architecture for In-Database Analytics
    SIGMOD Conference, 2012,
    [Full Version]
  • Hung Q. Ngo, Ely Porat, Christopher Ré, and Atri Rudra
    • Worst-case Optimal Join Algorithms
    PODS, 2012,
    Winner of the Best Paper Award
  • Ce Zhang, Feng Niu, Christopher Ré, and Jude Shavlik
    • Big Data versus the Crowd: Looking for Relationships in All the Right Places
    ACL, 2012,
  • Benjamin Recht and Christopher Ré
    • Toward a noncommutative arithmetic-geometric mean inequality: conjectures, case-studies, and consequences
    COLT, 2012,
    [Full Version]
  • Feng Niu, Ce Zhang, Christopher Ré, and Jude Shavlik
    • Elementary: Large-scale Knowledge-base Construction via Machine Learning and Statistical Inference
    IJSWIS, Special Issue on Knowledge Extraction from the Web, 2012, to appear
  • Feng Niu, Ce Zhang, Christopher Ré, and Jude Shavlik
    • DeepDive: Web-scale Knowledge-base Construction using Statistical Learning and Inference
    VLDS, 2012

2011
  • Dan Suciu, Dan Olteanu, Christopher Ré, and Christoph Koch
    • Probabilistic Databases
    Morgan Claypool's Synthesis Lectures on Data Management, 2011,
  • Mehmet Levent Koc and Christopher Ré
    • Incrementally maintaining classification using an RDBMS
    PVLDB Volume 4, 2011, p. 302-313
  • Feng Niu, Christopher Ré, AnHai Doan, and Jude W. Shavlik
    • Tuffy: Scaling up Statistical Inference in Markov Logic Networks using an RDBMS
    PVLDB Volume 4, 2011, p. 373-384
    [Full Version]
  • Eaman Jahani, Michael J. Cafarella, and Christopher Ré
    • Automatic Optimization for MapReduce Programs
    PVLDB Volume 4, 2011, p. 385-396
  • Nilesh N. Dalvi, Christopher Re, and Dan Suciu
    • Queries and materialized views on probabilistic databases
    J. Comput. Syst. Sci. Volume 77, 2011, p. 473-490
  • Benjamin Recht and Christopher Ré
    • Parallel Stochastic Gradient Algorithms for Large-Scale Matrix Completion
    Optimization Online, 2011,
  • Feng Niu, Benjamin Recht, Christopher Ré, and Stephen J. Wright
    • Hogwild!: A Lock-Free Approach to Parallelizing Stochastic Gradient Descent
    NIPS, 2011,
    [Full Version]
  • Feng Niu, Ce Zhang, Christopher Ré, and Jude Shavlik
    • Felix: Scaling Inference for Markov Logic with an Operator-based Approach
    ArXiv e-prints 2011,

2010
  • Michael J. Cafarella and Christopher Ré
    • Manimal: Relational Optimization for Data-Intensive Programs
    WebDB, 2010,
  • Benny Kimelfeld and Christopher Ré
    • Transducing Markov Sequences
    PODS, 2010,
    Selected as one of the best papers in PODS 2010
  • Christopher Ré and Dan Suciu
    • Understanding Cardinality Estimation using Entropy Maximization
    PODS, 2010,
    Selected as one of the best papers in PODS 2010
  • Julie Letchner, Christopher Ré, Magdalena Balazinska, and Matthai Philipose
    • Approximation Trade-Offs in a Markovian Stream Warehouse: An Empirical Study (Short Paper)
    ICDE, 2010,

2009
  • Christopher Ré
    • Managing Large-Scale Probabilistic Databases
    University of Washington, Seattle, 2009
    Winner of SIGMOD Jim Gray Thesis Award
  • Raghav Kaushik, Christopher Ré, and Dan Suciu
    • General Database Statistics Using Entropy Maximization
    DBPL, 2009, p. 84-99
    [Talk]
  • Katherine F. Moore, Vibhor Rastogi, Christopher Ré, and Dan Suciu
    • Query Containment of Tier-2 Queries over a Probabilistic Database
    Management of Uncertain Databases (MUD), 2009,
  • Julie Letchner, Christopher Ré, Magdalena Balazinska, and Matthai Philipose
    • Access Methods for Markovian Streams
    ICDE, 2009, p. 246-257
  • Arvind Arasu, Christopher Ré, and Dan Suciu
    • Large-Scale Deduplication with Constraints Using Dedupalog
    ICDE, 2009, p. 952-963
    [Talk]
    Selected as one of the best papers in ICDE 2009
  • Nilesh N. Dalvi, Christopher Ré, and Dan Suciu
    • Probabilistic databases: Diamonds in the dirt
    Commun. ACM Volume 52, 2009, p. 86-94
    [Full Version]
  • S. Manegold, I. Manolescu, L. Afanasiev, J. Feng, G. Gou, M. Hadjieleftheriou, S. Harizopoulos, P. Kalnis, K. Karanasos, D. Laurent, M. Lupu, N. Onose, C. Ré, V. Sans, P. Senellart, T. Wu, and D. Shasha
    • Repeatability & Workability Evaluation of SIGMOD 2009
    SIGMOD Record Volume 38, 2009, p. 40-43
  • Julie Letchner, Christopher Ré, Magdalena Balazinska, and Matthai Philipose
    • Lahar Demonstration: Warehousing Markovian Streams
    PVLDB Volume 2, 2009, p. 1610-1613
  • Christopher Ré and Dan Suciu
    • The Trichotomy of HAVING Queries on a Probabilistic Database
    VLDB Journal 2009,

2008
  • Christopher Ré
    • Managing Probabilistic Data with Mystiq (Plenary Talk)
    Daghstul Seminar 08421: Uncertainty Management in Information Systems, 2008,
  • Christopher Ré, and Dan Suciu
    • Advances in Processing SQL Queries on Probabilistic Data
    Invited Abstract in INFORMS 2008, Simulation., 2008,
  • Ting-You Wang, Christopher Ré, and Dan Suciu
    • Implementing NOT EXISTS Predicates over a Probabilistic Database
    QDB/MUD, 2008, p. 73-86
  • Nodira Khoussainova, Evan Welbourne, Magdalena Balazinska, Gaetano Borriello, Garrett Cole, Julie Letchner, Yang Li, Christopher Ré, Dan Suciu, and Jordan Walke
    • A demonstration of Cascadia through a digital diary application
    SIGMOD Conference, 2008, p. 1319-1322
  • Christopher Ré, Julie Letchner, Magdalena Balazinska, and Dan Suciu
    • Event queries on correlated probabilistic streams
    SIGMOD Conference, 2008, p. 715-728
  • Christopher Ré, and Dan Suciu
    • Managing Probabilistic Data with MystiQ: The Can-Do, the Could-Do, and the Can't-Do
    SUM, 2008, p. 5-18
  • Julie Letchner, Christopher Ré, Magdalena Balazinska, and Matthai Philipose
    • Challenges for Event Queries over Markovian Streams
    IEEE Internet Computing Volume 12, 2008, p. 30-36
  • Christopher Ré, and Dan Suciu
    • Approximate lineage for probabilistic databases
    PVLDB Volume 1, 2008, p. 797-808
    [Full Version][Talk]
    The version above corrects an error in the statement of lemma 3.7.
  • Magdalena Balazinska, Christopher Ré, and Dan Suciu
    • Systems aspects of probabilistic data management (Part I)
    PVLDB Volume 1, 2008, p. 1520-1521
    [Talk]
  • Magdalena Balazinska, Christopher Ré, and Dan Suciu
    • Systems aspects of probabilistic data management (Part II)
    PVLDB Volume 1, 2008, p. 1520-1521
    [Talk]

2007
  • Michael J. Cafarella, Christopher Ré, Dan Suciu, and Oren Etzioni
    • Structured Querying of Web Text Data: A Technical Challenge
    CIDR, 2007, p. 225-234
  • Christopher Re, and Dan Suciu
    • Management of data with uncertainties
    CIKM, 2007, p. 3-8
  • Christopher Ré, Dan Suciu, and Val Tannen
    • Orderings on Annotated Collections
    Liber Amicorum in honor of Jan Paredaens 60th Birthday, 2007,
  • Christopher Ré, and Dan Suciu
    • Efficient Evaluation of HAVING Queries
    DBPL, 2007, p. 186-200
    [Full Version][Talk]
  • Christopher Ré, Nilesh N. Dalvi, and Dan Suciu
    • Efficient Top-k Query Evaluation on Probabilistic Data
    ICDE, 2007, p. 886-895
    [Full Version][Talk]
  • Christopher Re and Dan Suciu
    • Materialized Views in Probabilistic Databases for Information Exchange and Query Optimization
    VLDB, 2007, p. 51-62
    [Full Version][Talk]
  • Christopher Ré
    • Applications of Probabilistic Constraints (General Exam Paper)
    University of Washington TR#2007-03-03 2007,
  • Eytan Adar and Christopher Ré
    • Managing Uncertainty in Social Networks
    IEEE Data Eng. Bull. Volume 30, 2007, p. 15-22

2006
  • Giorgio Ghelli, Christopher Ré, and Jér^ome Sim'eon
    • XQuery!: An XML Query Language with Side Effects
    EDBT Workshops, 2006, p. 178-191
  • Christopher Re, Jér^ome Sim'eon, and Mary F. Fern'andez
    • A Complete and Efficient Algebraic Compiler for XQuery
    ICDE, 2006, p. 14
  • Christopher Ré, Nilesh N. Dalvi, and Dan Suciu
    • Query Evaluation on Probabilistic Databases
    IEEE Data Eng. Bull. Volume 29, 2006, p. 25-31

2005
  • Chavdar Botev, Hubert Chao, Theodore Chao, Yim Cheng, Raymond Doyle, Sergey Grankin, Jon Guarino, Saikat Guha, Pei-Chen Lee, Dan Perry, Christopher Re, Ilya Rifkin, Tingyan Yuan, Dora Abdullah, Kathy Carpenter, David Gries, Dexter Kozen, Andrew C. Myers, David I. Schwartz, and Jayavel Shanmugasundaram
    • Supporting workflow in a course management system
    SIGCSE, 2005, p. 262-266
  • Jihad Boulos, Nilesh N. Dalvi, Bhushan Mandhani, Shobhit Mathur, Christopher Ré, and Dan Suciu
    • MYSTIQ: a system for finding more answers by using probabilities
    SIGMOD Conference, 2005, p. 891-893
  • Nathan Bales, James Brinkley, E. Sally Lee, Shobhit Mathur, Christopher Re, and Dan Suciu
    • A Framework for XML-Based Integration of Data, Visualization and Analysis in a Biomedical Domain
    XSym, 2005, p. 207-221

2004
  • Christopher Ré, Jim Brinkley, Kevin Hinshaw, and Dan Suciu
    • Distributed XQuery
    Workshop on Information Integration on the Web (IIWeb), 2004, p. 116-121

2003
  • Werner Vogels and Christopher Ré
    • WS-Membership - Failure Management in a Web-Services World
    WWW (Alternate Paper Tracks), 2003,

2002
  • Werner Vogels, Christopher Ré, Robbert Renesse, and Kenneth P. Birman
    • A Collaborative Infrastructure for Scalable and Robust News Delivery
    ICDCS Workshops, 2002, p. 655-659

Christopher (Chris) Re is an assistant professor in the department of computer sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The goal of his work is to enable users and developers to build applications that more deeply understand and exploit data. Chris received his PhD from the University of Washington in Seattle under the supervision of Dan Suciu. For his PhD work in probabilistic data management, Chris received the SIGMOD 2010 Jim Gray Dissertation Award. Chris's papers have received four best-paper or best-of-conference citations, including best paper in PODS 2012, best-of-conference in PODS 2010 twice, and one best-of-conference in ICDE 2009). Chris received an NSF CAREER Award in 2011 and an Alfred P. Sloan fellowship in 2013.

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  • AirForce. Thank you to the Air Force for supporting Mathematical Foundations of Secure Computing Clouds; this is the hard work of Jordan Ellenberg (Math), Ben Recht (CS), Tom Ristenpart (CS), Rob Nowak (EE), and Steve Wright (CS).
  • Oracle. Thank you for continuing support to support the Hazy Research group! This gift will be used to continue our work on feature engineering for structured analytics.
  • ONR Thank you to the Office of Naval Research for supporting Ben Recht, Steve Wright, and my proposal about An Architecture for Integrating Information and Simplifying Large-scale Statistical Data Analysis (Award No. N000141310129)
  • AmFam Thank you to American Family Insurance for their generous support of the Hazy group's research. We're very excited about the collaboration.
  • DDR&E Thank you to DDR&E, DARPA, and Raytheon for funding Ben Recht and my proposal about operator splitting for information fusion applications.
  • DARPA Thank you to DARPA (DEFT) for funding Jude Shavlik, Sriraam Natarajan (Wake Forest), and my proposal Creating Robust Relation Extractors and Anomaly Detectors via Probabilistic Logic-Based Reasoning and Learning.
  • NSF. Thank you to the NSF for funding an EAGER to work on 'extracting Dark Data' with Shanan Peters from UW Geoscience and Miron Livny from CS.
  • Google Research Award. Thank you to GOOGLE for supporting our proposal, GeoDeepDive: Machine Reading of Measurements.
  • Oracle and Oracle Labs. Thank you to the Oracle Labs and the Oracle Analytics team for their generous support of the Hazy group's work! We are really excited to learn what customers need from in-database analytics. This will help support Arun's work. He and I are both very excited!
  • Greenplum/EMC. Thank you to Greenplum/EMC for their generous support of the Hazy group's work! We are really excited to learn from this collaboration -- and to push some of Aaron and Arun's stuff in to MADlib!, an awesome open-source library for scalable in-database analytics.
  • Office of Naval Research. Thank you to the ONR for support of my work under award no. N000141210041! This funding will allow our group to embark on a theoretical investigation of the foundations of building a large-scale, easy-to-use data-analysis system.
  • NSF CAREER. I recently received the NSF CAREER award (IIS-1054009). Thank you to the NSF for their generous support of Hazy.
  • IceCube. The Hazy group is extremely excited to announce funding for an exploratory data analysis project. The goal of the project is to apply Hazy's ideas to the problem of detecting neutrinos from the Big Bang in collaboration with the IceCube Neutrino Detector and Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery.
  • LogicBlox The Hazy group is excited to collaborate with LogicBlox! Thank you, LogicBlox, for your generous research gift to support our ongoing work on Tuffy and Felix.
  • DARPA DARPA's Machine Reading Program has the goal of understanding information expressed as free-form text. We are building a scalable engine to process a probabilistic logic called Markov Logic to support this effort.
  • Thank You! The Hazy group would like to thank our sponsors in the past and coming year: The Microsoft Jim Gray Lab, DARPA/AFOSR via SRI, the NSF, Google, Johnson Controls Inc., the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the Office of Naval Research, and Physical Layer Systems. In addition, we would like to thank our collaborators at the Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery, HP Labs-China, LogicBlox, Greenplum, Oracle and IBM.

Current Students

  • Victor Bittorf
  • Vidhya Govindaraju
  • Arun Kumar
  • Mark Wellons (co-advised with Ben Recht)
  • Pradap Konda
  • Zach Thomae (undergrad)
  • Ce Zhang

Alumni

  • Feng Niu (co-advised with AnHai Doan) (PhD, 2012, first employment: Google)
  • Xixi Luo (MS in Industrial Engineering, 2012, first employment: Oracle)
  • Josh Slauson
  • Vinod Ramachandran (MS, 2011, first employment: Oracle)
  • M. Levent Koc (MS, 2011, first employment: Google)
  • Balaji Gopalan (MS, 2010, first employment: Google)

Current Project: Hazy

The Hazy Website contains some of the initial components of our system, Hazy, whose main research goal is to understand the abstractions that are needed to build, to deploy, and to maintian statistical systems that use data. That page is updated by my students, and it is usually always a more up-to-date reference than this page. A description of completed projects can be found here.
  • Spring 13: CS764-1, Topics in Database Management Systems
  • Fall 12: None.
  • Spring 12: None.
  • Fall 11: CS 564-1,Database Management Systems
  • Spring 11: CS764-1, Topics in Database Management Systems
  • Fall 10: CS 564-1, Database Management Systems
  • Spring 10: CS 838-3, Probabilistic Data Management
  • Spring 10: CS 900-1, Presentation Seminar for Database Students
  • Fall 09: CS 564-2, Database Management Systems