Knowledge Graphs (2004–2015)

This project was among the first in the database research community to study building knowledge graphs, commonly called knowledge bases at the time.

We focused on building community knowledge bases. Our prototype was DBLife, a community knowledge base for the database research community.

This work influenced my subsequent work at Kosmix and WalmartLabs, where I worked on knowledge graphs for social media analytics and e-commerce.

Community Knowledge Bases

Vision and System

Information Extraction

Entity Matching

Crowdsourcing

Querying

Knowledge Bases for Social Media Analytics

From 2010-2011 I was on leave from UW-Madison, working as Chief Scientist of Kosmix, a startup in social media analytics.

I worked on several projects that built Web-scale knowledge bases for social media analytics. Parts of these projects are described in the following papers:

I also worked on event detection and monitoring for social media. A talk that describes work at Kosmix at a high level: Social Media, Data Integration, and Human Computation.

Knowledge Bases for E-Commerce

Kosmix was acquired by Walmart in 2011 and turned into WalmartLabs, the research and development lab for e-commerce at Walmart.

From 2011-2014 I worked as Chief Scientist of WalmartLabs. I worked on building product knowledge bases, focusing on product matching, information extraction, data/rule cleaning, and crowdsourcing. Parts of these projects are described in the following papers:

The work at WalmartLabs motivated the Magellan project on entity matching, which is still ongoing.