Computer Science Colloquium

Jayant Madhavan, a member of the Structured Data Research group at Google Inc., will speak on "Big Data for Data Enthusiasts."

November 20, 2013
4:15 pm - 5:30 pm
Location
006 Steele
Sponsored by
Computer Science Department
Audience
Public
More information
Shannon Stearne

Data enthusiasts, such as data journalists, social scientists and data
activists, through their data-driven advocacy, play an important role
in the big data movement. While they have interesting datasets, they
often lack the technical expertise and resources to deal effectively
with them. However, much of the current buzz around big data has
focused on computational challenges, and ignores the challenges faced
by data enthusiasts. In this talk, Madhavan will describe how Google Fusion
Tables (GFT) is beginning to address their specific data management
needs. In particular, he will address two challenges. First, GFT
enables users to create and publish interactive visualizations over
large datasets, a feature that is key to data-driven storytelling.
Interactive maps created using GFT are frequently featured in
prominent news stories that generate extremely high volumes of
traffic.  He will also describe the challenges and solutions in supporting
such maps over large complex geo-spatial datasets. Second, GFT enables
users to find interesting public datasets and to piece together new
datasets by combining related ones, features that are key to data
advocacy. The speaker will describe the challenges and solutions in finding the
right dataset and how such data search can ultimately have a broader
impact on web search.

Bio: Jayant Madhavan is a member of the Structured Data Research group
at Google Inc. His research interests include data integration, web
search and data visualizations. Until recently, he led the engineering
team for Google Fusion Tables, a cloud data management solution. He
was the Chief Architect at Transformic Inc., a portal that built
search engines for the Deep Web, which was acquired by Google in 2005.
He is a recipient of the Ten Year Best Paper Award at VLDB 2011. He
received a Ph.D. from the University of Washington in 2005 and a
B.Tech. from IIT Bombay in 1999.

Location
006 Steele
Sponsored by
Computer Science Department
Audience
Public
More information
Shannon Stearne