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CONTACT: Virginia Gold
New York, NY, February 12, 2004 -- Dr. AnHai Doan, an assistant professor of computer science at the University of Illinois, has won ACM's prestigious Doctoral Dissertation Award for his study on reconciling the vocabularies of different data sources. Dr. Doan's work on data mapping, known as representation matching, lies at the heart of applications that manipulate data from different formats. Representation matching ensures operability in a broad range of applications, including information integration, data mining, e-commerce, bioinformatics, and information processing on the World Wide Web. Dr. Doan will receive the Doctoral Dissertation Award and its $5,000 prize at the annual ACM Awards Banquet on June 5, 2004, at the Plaza Hotel in New York. Dr. Doan's dissertation applies machine learning techniques to develop semi-automatic solutions to representation matching. His paper, Learning to Map Between Structured Representations of Data, was nominated by the University of Washington. It was selected from among 30 theses nominated by computer science departments from leading universities around the world, including MIT, Stanford, Carnegie Mellon, Universite de Geneve and Tel Aviv University. The award is presented annually for the best doctoral dissertation in computer science and engineering. Financial support and publication of the winning dissertation are provided by Springer-Verlag. Dr. Doan says he works "at the intersection of databases and artificial intelligence," incorporating technologies from both fields. "Today, representation matching is mainly conducted by hand in a labor intensive and error-prone process," he notes. "The prohibitive costs of this process are a key bottleneck to the deployment of many information management applications." Honorable mention for this award went to Dina Katabi, for her dissertation Decoupling Congestion Control from the Bandwidth Allocation Policy and its Application to High Bandwidth-Delay Product Networks, nominated by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; and Subhash Khot, for his dissertation New Techniques for Probabilistically Checkable Proofs and Inapproximability Results, nominated by Princeton University. Dr. Doan was awarded his doctorate in computer science from the University of Washington in 2003. He earned an MS from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and a BS from Kossuth Lajos University in Hungary. He is a member of ACM's Special Interest Group on Management of Data (SIGMOD). A native of Vietnam, Dr. Doan learned English while a student in Hungary. He was a member of the team representing Vietnam at the 27th International Mathematics Olympiad in 1986. Dr. Doan is currently pursuing research in semantic integration, which involves seeking meaningful relationships and matching the vocabulary of different data bases; and building information processing systems such as search engines that learn to self-improve over time. About ACM The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) is a major force in advancing the skills of information technology professionals and students. ACM serves its global membership by delivering cutting edge technical information and transferring ideas from theory to practice. ACM hosts the computing industry's leading Portal to Computing Literature. With its world-class journals and magazines, dynamic special interest groups, numerous conferences, workshops and electronic forums, ACM is a primary resource for the information technology field. For additional information about ACM, visit our web site at http://www.acm.org/. |
