PRINCIPAL RESEARCH PROJECTS SUBMISSIONS
Please keep comments as succinct as possible and do not exceed 3 pages in total. This
form will be published on the EPSRC’s website as part of the publication of evidence
received by the panel.
Institution(s):
University of
Edinburgh
Institute/Group Name:
Main Contact:
Peter Buneman
Institute/Group Size
(FTE)
Academic
5–7
Researchers
(FTE)
PG Students 10 or
(FTE)
more
Group webpage
DCC http://www.dcc.ac.uk/ and
UoE Database Group
http://www.lfcs.inf.ed.ac.uk/resea
rch/database/
School of
Informatics,
Database Group,
LFCS
Lecturers 4
(FTE)
Strategic Vision Statement of e-Science research (200 words max.):
The most exciting interactions between computer sciences and other sciences are
those in which there is engagement between the principles of the disciplines.
Examples include quantum computing, constraints systems in physics, computational
models of biological systems, computational linguistics, new models in economics,
etc. Some of this is described in the Microsoft "Towards 2020 Science" report.
Unfortunately e-science does not appear to have been interpreted by the UK funding
agencies to include these topics.
Research Themes (the programme review structure is based on the following
themes. Please identify those relevant to your research numbering them in
order of priority. Please also give a brief summary of your research focus in
each theme and give the key lead contact(s)) (200 words max.):
x
Data and Information Management
x
Sharing and Collaboration
Distributed Research Infrastructures
Research Tools and Techniques
Physical Sciences and Engineering
Medicinal and Biological Sciences
Social Sciences, Arts and Humanities
Environmental Sciences
Peter Buneman – semistructured data, curated databases, query languages.
Wenfei Fan – XML integration, data integration, data transformation, data cleaning,
distributed query evaluation, web services.
Leonid Libkin – Logic, XML constraints, data exchange.
Stratis Viglas – New storage architectures. Distributed query processing. Data
representations.
Key Research Highlights over last ten years (these might include journal
papers, awards, patents, spinout activity, etc. Please be selective and choose
a top five similar to RAE).
Peter Buneman: FRS, FACM, RS Wolfson Merit Award
Wenfei Fan: BCS Needham award
Leonid Libkin: Marie Curie Chair in CS
Wenfei Fan, Floris Geerts, Xibei Jia and Anastasios Kementsietsidis, Conditional Functional
Dependencies for Capturing Data Inconsistencies. ACM Transactions on Database Systems, 33,2
(2008). [This was the topic of his Needham Award talk and initial commercialisation]
Wenfei Fan, Chee Yong Chan and M. Garofalakis, Secure XML Querying with Security Views,
SIGMOD, 2004 [One of the most highly cited papers on XML security]
Marcelo Arenas, Leonid Libkin: A normal form for XML documents. ACM Transactions on Database
Systems 29: 195-232 (2004) [An elegant transfer of DB principles to XML]
Michael Benedikt, Leonid Libkin: Relational queries over interpreted structures. Journal of the ACM
47(4): 644-680 (2000) [One of Leonid’s deepest papers]
Peter Buneman, James Cheney, and Stijn VanSummeren. On the expressiveness of implicit
provenance in query and update languages. In Proceedings of the 2007 International Conference on
Database Theory. Springer, Jan 2007. [Not hugely cited, but one of my nicest recent ideas]
Peter Buneman, Sanjeev Khanna, and Wang Chiew Tan. Why and Where: A Characterization of
Data Provenance. In Jan Van den Bussche and Victor Vianu, editors, International Conference on
Database Theory, pages 316-330. Springer, LNCS 1973, 2001. [Has started a minor industry]
Key Research results taken up by industry and/or other users and/or policy
makers over the past ten years (please provide information about the
technologies and how they were adopted - 200 words max.).
 Comprehension syntax (Buneman et al.)– adopted by most query languages and
for interface languages such as C-omega.
 Data cleaning techniques (Fan et al.) in early stages of commercialisation.
 Constraints for semistructured data XML – initiated by Buneman, Fan and Libkin
and now wide research area.
 Data provenance – Initiated by Buneman. Broad impact in computer science.
Graduate Student Research Training (Please provide brief details of type of
training provided, including current numbers of students as well as trends
over the last ten years, country of origin, gender and first destination
analysis).
Very rough guess: 10-20 PhD students produced by Buneman, Fan and Libkin,
mostly in academia. An internationally diverse group.
Funding - Describe ongoing support for e-Science enabled research. Please
aggregate the data where possible (or please use HESA headings – RC, other
public funding etc.).
Buneman: EPSRC Platform Grant: Heterogeneous and Permanent Data (2008-12,
~£1.4m); Marie Curie Chair Award (PI, beneficiary Leonid Libkin) (2005-08, ~£400k); EPSRC
Visitor, Prof. Marc Scholl (2005, £6k); EPSRC (PI, with others) Digital Curation Centre
Research (2004-07, ~£1.1m); EPSRC: Vectorised XML, (PI, with Douglas Armstrong) (200306, £233k); Royal Society Wolfson Merit Award (2002-07, ~£275k); Digital Libraries (NSF,
DARPA, NLM) (PI with Davidson et al.) (1999-2002, £500k)
Fan: EPSRC Follow on Fund (PI) (2009-10, £102k); EPSRC data cleaning project (PI)
(2007-10, £481k); EPSRC XML security project (PI) (2005-2008, £310k); Royal Society of
Edinburgh Enterprise Fellowship (PI) (2008-2009, £87k); EPSRC XML publishing (co-PI)
(2004-2007, £338k); Distinguished Overseas Young Scholar Award (PI) (2003-2005, RMB
400k); NSF Career Award (PI) (2001-2006, US$300k)
Libkin: Databases and interpreted data: constraints, strings, documents (PI), NSERC (200104, CDN$140k); Databases on the web: design, semantics, and query processing (PI),
PREA Grant (2002-2006, CDN$150k); IBM Fellowship: Design Principles for XML Data
(2004-05, CDN$29k); Designing, querying, and exchanging web data (PI), NSERC (2005-10,
CDN$250k); XML Data (PI), EU Marie Curie Chair Programme (2006-09, €480k); Relational
and XML Data Exchange: Semantics, Consistency, and Query Answering (PI), EPSRC
(2006-09, £458k); XML with Incomplete Information: Representation, Querying, and
Applications (PI), EPSRC (2009-13, £577k)
Key Collaborators (Academic and non academic, including overseas,
please provide details about main groups, countries and sources of funding
(200 words max.))
Adriane Chapman, U. Michigan/Mitre Corp
Alin Deutsch, UCSD
Alon Y. Halevy, Microsoft (Redmond)
Anastasios Kementsietsidis, IBM TJ Watson
Antonella Poggi, U. Rome "La Sapienza"
Arek Kasprzyk, EBI
Atsushi Ohori, Tohoku University
Benjamin C. Pierce, U. Pennsylvania
Carmem S. Hara, U. Federal do Parana (Br)
Chee Yong Chan, National U. of Singapore
Christoph Koch, Cornell
Cristina Sirangelo, ENS, Paris
Dan Suciu, University of Washington
David J. DeWitt, University of Wisconsin
David Maier, Portland State University
Fausto Rabitti, CNR, Italy
Feng Tian, Chinese Academy of Sciences
Frank Neven, Hasselt University, Belgium
Gabriel M. Kuper, University of Trento
Gao Cong, University of Aarhus
Georg Gottlob, TU Wien/Oxford
Guozhu Dong, Wright State University
Hans-Jörg Schek, ETH Zurich
Hongjun Lu, Hong Kong U. of Sci. & Tech.
Hongwei Wu, Tsinghua University
Jayavel Shanmugasundaram, Cornell Uni.
Jeffrey F. Naughton, University of Wisconsin
Jeffrey Xu Yu, University of Tsukuba, Japan
Jianchang Xiao, Fudan University
Jianhua Lu, Tsinghua University
Jianzhong Li, Harbin Inst. of Tech., China
Juha Nurmonen, Helsinki University
Juliana Freire, University of Utah
János Demetrovics, Hungarian Ac. of Sci.
Jérôme Siméon, IBM TJ Watson
Kun Yue, Yunnan University
Laks V. S. Lakshmanan, U. British Columbia
Laurent Mignet, IBM India
Le Gruenwald, University of Oklahoma
Limsoon Wong, National U. of Singapore
Loreto Bravo, U. de Concepción, Chile
Louiqa Raschid, University of Maryland
Luc Segoufin, ENS, Paris
Marcelo Arenas, Pontificia U. Católica de
Chile
Martin Grohe, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
Martín Abadi, University of Santa Cruz
Mary F. Fernández, AT&T Labs
Michael Benedikt, Oxford University
Michael Flaster, Google
Ming Xiong, Bell Laborarories
Minos N. Garofalakis, Technical U. of Crete
Neil Immerman, UMass Amherst
Pablo Barceló, University of Chile
Per-Åke Larson, Microsoft Redmond
Philip Bohannon, Yahoo!
Qiong Luo, Hong Kong U. of Sci. & Tech.
Rajasekar Krishnamurthy, IBM Almaden
Rajeev Alur, University of Pennsylvania
Rajeev Rastogi, Yahoo! Bangalore
Richard Hull, IBM TJ Watson
Ronald Fagin, IBM Almaden
Sanjeev Khanna, U. Pennsylvania
Scott Weinstein, U. Pennsylvania
Serge Abiteboul, University of Paris Orsay
Stefano Ceri, University of Milan
Stijn Vansummeren, University of Brussels
Susan B. Davidson, U. Pennsylvania
Thomas Eiter, Technical University of Vienna
Thomas Schwentick, University of Passau
Timos K. Sellis, National Tech. U. of Athens
Timothy G. Griffin, University of Cambridge
Tova Milo, Tel Aviv University
Vassilis Christophides, FORTH, U. of Crete
Victor Vianu, UCSD
Wang Chiew Tan, U. of California Santa Cruz
Wenguang Chen, Beijing University
Wouter Gelade, University of Hasselt
Yannis E. Ioannidis, University of Athens
Zhaohui Wu, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou
Use and access to facilities (please provide details of main facilities used, any
issues relating to access and frequency of usage. This can include e-Science
infrastructure (i.e. NGS, OMII, DCC, etc.) and others, including campus
facilities).
Normal university computing facilities.
Public engagement activities (please provide details of activities such as
public lectures, engaging with the media etc (200 words max.)).
 Buneman has given several public lectures on curated databases and digital
curation at universities, libraries and related institutions.
 Fan has delivered public lectures in London (Royal Society), Edinburgh and China
on data cleaning.
 Not directly connected with e-Science funding, Buneman has received substantial
press coverage over rural internet issues.