The EECS Department welcomes Prof. AnHai Doan, Professor in Dept. of CS at University of Wisconsin.

Doan will present a talk entitled "Toward an Integrated Research, System Building, Education, and Outreach Agenda for Data Science" on Wednesday, October 18 at 2:00 PM in Ford ITW Room.

Abstract: Data science has received significant interest in the data management community, but no clear agenda has been offered. In this talk I propose such an agenda. I focus on the first part of the data science pipeline, which extracts, cleans, and integrates data from disparate sources for later analysis. For important tasks in this part, I propose to (a) develop how-to guides that tell users how to solve the tasks end-to-end, (b) examine the guides to identify all true pain points, then (c) develop solutions and tools for the pain points. Tools will be built as packages in the Python ecosystem of open-source data science tools, and can be leveraged to build cloud/crowd services for lay users. I discuss how this proposal is radically different from current work, which does not solve tasks end-to-end, addresses isolated problems which may not even be pain points, and builds stand-alone RDBMS-style systems. This proposal gives rise to an integrated agenda of research, system building, education, and outreach for data science. I will discuss what we have done in this agenda in the past two years at Wisconsin, successes, challenges, and lessons learned.

Bio: AnHai Doan is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His interests cover data cleaning, data integration, and data science. He received the ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award in 2003, a CAREER Award in 2004, a Sloan Fellowship in 2007, and a Vilas Associate Award in 2016. He co-authored ``Principles of Data Integration'', a textbook by Morgan-Kaufmann in 2012. AnHai was on the Advisory Board of Transformic, a Deep Web startup acquired by Google in 2005, and was Chief Scientist of Kosmix, a social media startup acquired by Walmart in 2011. From 2011 to 2014 he was Chief Scientist of WalmartLabs, a newly formed R&D lab at Walmart, devoted to analyzing and integrating data for e-commerce.

Hosted by EECS Prof. Jennie Rogers