Alon Halevy's Home Page

I head the Structured Data Group of Google Research in Mountain View, California. I joined Google in 2005 with the acquisition of my company, Transformic. Prior to that, I was a professor of Computer Science at the University of Washington, where I founded the UW CSE Database Group in 1998. You can follow me on Twitter for more frequent updates, or check out my blog.

My Google Scholar author page

My coffee book, The Infinite Emotions of Coffee is out! With tales, photos and data visualizations from 30 countries on 6 continents, the book will introduce you to the amazing world of coffee today. I recommend reading it while drinking a macchiatone, a drink known to be the perfect combination of foamed milk and espresso.

The main goals of my work at Google are to make data management tools collaborative and much easier to use, and to leverage the incredible collections of structured data on the Web.

My group is responsible for Google Fusion Tables, a service for managing data in the cloud that focuses on ease of use, collaboration and data integration. Fusion Tables enables users to upload spreadsheets, CSV and KML files and share them with collaborators or with the public. You can easily integrate data from multiple sources (and organizations) and use a collection of visualizations to look at your data. In particular, Fusion Tables is deeply integrated with Google Maps, making it easy to visualize large geographic data sets. To facilitate collaboration, users can conduct fine-grained discussions on the data. You can see some examples of how Fusion Tables is being used. You can interact with Fusion Tables through our UI or our API.

Some other notable projects from my group at Google include our Deep-web crawl and WebTables, the first system to ever collect offer search over the collection of HTML tables on the Web.

Both of these projects are examples of the broader area of research on Dataspace Systems, which provide pay-as-you-go data management based on best-effort services.

In the past I have worked extensively on data integration (and a book on the topic is in preparation), as well as personal information management, XML, query optimization, peer-data management systems, knowledge representation (relevance reasoning and combining Horn rules with Description Logics). In general, I am very interested in the combination of techniques from Artificial Intelligence and Data Management.

In my other free time, you can either see me at the gym under a big pile of weights, jogging, in a movie cinema, trying to explain to a barista how to prepare a macchiatone, or, more likely, with my wife Oriana and our two kids Karina and Kasper.

Alon Halevy Bio

Dr. Alon Halevy heads the Structured Data Group at Google Research. Prior to that, he was a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Washington, where he founded the Database Research Group. From 1993 to 1997 he was a Principal Member of Technical Staff at AT&T Bell Laboratories (later AT&T Laboratories). He received his Ph.D in Computer Science from Stanford University in 1993, and his Bachelors degree in Computer Science and Mathematics from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem in 1988.

Dr. Halevy's research interests are in data integration, structured-data on the Web, semantic heterogeneity, personal information management, management of XML data, web-site management, peer-data management systems, query optimization, database theory, knowledge representation, and more generally, the intersection between Database and AI technologies. His research developed several systems, such as the Information Manifold data integration system, the Strudel web-site management system, the LSD schema matching system, the Tukwila XML data integration system. He was also a co-developer of XML-QL, which later contributed to the development of XQuery standard for querying XML data. His group at Google developed Google Fusion Tables, a collaborative tool for data management and visualization in the cloud.

In 1999, Dr. Halevy co-founded Nimble Technology, one of the first companies in the Enterprise Information Integration space (acquired by Actuate in 2003). In 2004, Dr. Halevy founded Transformic Inc., a company that created search engines for the deep web, content residing in databases behind web forms (acquired by Google in 2005).

Dr. Halevy is a Fellow of the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM). He was a Sloan Fellow (1999-2000), and received the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) in 2000. His original paper on the Information Manifold System received the VLDB 2006 Test of Time Award. He currently serves on the Board of Trustees of the VLDB Endowment. He served on the editorial board of the VLDB Journal, as an associate editor and advisor for the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research and on the editorial board of ACM Transactions on Internet Technology. He served as the program chair for the ACM SIGMOD 2003 Conference. He has given multiple keynotes at top conferences, and Distinguished Lectures at several Computer Science Departments.

Teaching

In the Spring of 2008 I taught a Data Integration course at Stanford.

When I was at the University of Washington I taught undergraduate and graduate courses on data management. I am very keen on extending the scope of data management course to consider environments that involve multiple databases and other data sources inter-operating with each other. The following paper (published in the SIGMOD Record, September, 2003) describes the first step in this direction, and explains how I incorporate heterogeneous database issues into my senior-level data management course.

Below are links to my UW courses (follow at your own risk).

Spring 2004: CSEP 544 - Database Management Systems for the Professional Masters Program.
Winter 2004: CSE 444 - Introduction to Database Systems.
Winter 2003: CSE 444 - Introduction to Database Systems. This is the new and cool version, winner of the CIDR 2003 Award for Most Outrageous Idea
Spring 2002: CSE 594 - Database Management Systems for the Professional Masters Program.
Spring 2002: CSE 444 - Introduction to Database Systems.
Spring, 2001: CSE 326 - Data structures and algorithms.
Fall, 2000: CSE 594 - Database Management Systems for the Professional Masters Program.
Spring, 2000: CSE 544 - Principles of Database Systems (the graduate database course).
Fall, 1999: CSE 444 - Introduction to Database Systems.
Fall, 1999: CSE 590DB - The Database Seminar: Data Mining.
Spring, 1999: CSE 544 - graduate course on database management systems.
Winter, 1999: CSE 473 - Introduction to Artificial Intelligence.
Fall, 1998: CSE 444 - Introduction to Database Systems.
Spring, 1998: CSE-590DB - graduate seminar in database systems.

A few presentations

The following are pdf or powerpoint files of some talks I've given. You can search for more using the search box below.

Bringing (Web) Databases to the Masses. I gave this talk at several venues: Distinguished Lectures given at U.C. Santa Barbara, U.C. San Diego, Purdue University, SUNY Buffalo, and invited talk at the Santa Fe Institute. 2008-2009.
Structured Data on the Web. I gave this talk at several venues: Keynotes at the Australasian Computer Science Week (January, 2010), New England Database Day (January, 2009), Neuro Informatics Congress (September, 2009), NGITS (June, 2009), APWeb (April, 2010), Invited talk at ISI (April, 2009).
Building Data Integration Systems for the Web. Invited talk at the NSF Information Integration Workshop (Washington D.C., April, 2010).
Table Search. Keynote at DBRank (at ICDE, Anaheim, March, 2010).
User-Focused Data Management Keynote at IUI 2009, Florida.
Removing Barriers to Data Analysis. Panel presentation at the NAE Panel on Large-scale data analysis, Seattle, May, 2010.
Principles of Dataspace Systems. Keynote at PODS 2006.
Semex: A Platform for Personal Information Management and Integration. This particular talk was given at the NY Area DB/IR Workshop, on April 15, 2005. Earlier versions were given at Berkeley, Stanford, UC Santa Cruz, Nasa Ames and IBM Almaden in the preceding months.
Structures, Semantics and Statistics. VLDB 2004 Keynote, Toronto, Canada, September 1, 2004.
Crossing the Structure Chasm. Norman E. Friedmann Distingished Lecture, University of California at Los Angeles, April, 2004.
Crossing the Structure Chasm. Distingished Lecture Series, University of British Columbia, Canada, January, 2004.
Learning to Reconcile Semantic Heterogeneity. The New England Database Symposium (NEDS), April, 2004.
Data Integration: Successes and Challegnes. Invited talk at IJCAI, Acapulco, Mexico, August, 2003.
Data Integration: a Status Report. Invited talk at the German Database Conference (BTW), Leipzig, Germany, February, 2003.
Peer-data management systems: plumbing for the semantic web. Invited talk at the AAAI Spring Symposium on Mining Answers from Text and Knowledge Bases. Stanford, California, March, 2002.

Former Graduate Students

Michael Cafarella, Assistant Professor, University of Michigan at Ann Arbor (ok, he wasn't officially my student).
Luna Dong, AT&T Research.
Anhai Doan, Associate Professor, University of Wisconsin, Madison. Winner of the 2003 ACM Distinguished Dissertation Award.
Zack Ives, Associate Professor, University of Pennsylvania.
Luke McDowell, Associate Professor, United States Naval Academy.
Jayant Madhavan, Google Inc.
Peter Mork, MITRE Corp.
Rachel Pottinger, Assistant Professor, University of British Columbia.
Igor Tatarinov, Microsoft.
Marc Friedman, Microsoft.

Undergraduate students

I always strive to include undergraduate students in my research efforts. The following is a partial list of students I've worked with.

Shiori Betzler
Brian Chang
Kuang Chen
Eric Chu
Ewa Jaslikowska
Konstantin Komissarchik
Jacob Kreutzer
Dinh Lam
Chia-Chi Li
Jina Li
Vivian Li
Jeff Lin
Theresa MacDuff
Eric Ott
Ignatia Suwarna
Seth Whelan
Wai Tak Theodora Yeung

Awards and Funding

I was elected Fellow of the ACM in 2006.

The Information Manifold paper received the VLDB 2006 10-year Best Paper Award. In honor of the occasion, the original co-authors wrote a 10-year retrospective on data integration research and industry.

In 2000 I received the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), and I was awarded a Sloan Fellowship (1999-2000).

The award I'm most proud of is one that isn't really mine -- my former Ph.D student, AnHai Doan, received the 2003 ACM Distinguished Dissertation Award.

As a faculty member I was funded by grants from the National Science Foundation (PECASE, IDM, ITR, SEIII), DARPA (CALO), and the National Institute of Health. I have also received research gifts from Microsoft Research, NEC Corporation, NTT Corporation of Japan, and Ford Motor Company.

My Entrepreneurial Activities

I am also an entrepreneur and regularly consult for various companies.

In 2004 I founded Transformic, a company that built search engines for the deep web, i.e., the content on the web that is stored in databases and hides behind forms. Its first search engine offered access to hundreds of classifieds sites on the web. The following paper describes the problems of schema heterogeneity in today's commercial world and some of the recent work addressing it. Transformic was acquired by Google in September, 2005.

In 1999 I co-founded Nimble Technology, one of the first companies in the space of Enterprise Information Integration. Nimble built tools for querying and integrating disparate heterogeneous data sources. Nimble was acquired by Actuate in August, 2003. The following paper describes some of the successes, challenges and controversies surrounding the EII industry today (all presented in an industrial session at SIGMOD 2005).

I've also consulted for several companies, including SAP, Microsoft, a few startups and expert witness cases.

Contact Information
Email:	Mailing address: 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View, CA, 94043	Phone: (650) 253-2574