Room 14.09.19,
School of Computer Science and Information Technology,
RMIT University,
GPO Box 2476, Melbourne 3001
Victoria, Australia
Email: zhifeng dot bao @ rmit.edu.au
Tel: +61 3 992 51940
Fax: +61 3 9925 3748
I am looking for PhD/master students to work with me on various data usability projects. If you are a highly motivated and creative student and interested in doing database research, please email me (see prospective students).
There are a number of scholarships (APA, IPRS, RPIS, RPS, VCPS) and funded places available.
General Information
Dr. Bao holds a continuing position as Lecturer in School of Computer Science & Information Technology at RMIT (Melbourne, Australia). He is affiliated with the recently launched RMIT-NICTA Data Analytics Joint Lab, where he is actively participating the research activities in BDDA (Big Data Analytics) group led by Prof. Timos Sellis and ISAR (Information Storage, Analysis and Retrieval) led by Prof. Mark Sanderson.
I obtained my PhD in computer science from National University of Singapore (NUS) in 2011. I was a research scientist in the Interactive&Digital Medida Institute (IDMI), working with Prof. Anthony Tung to build a GPU-cluster for Real-time Analysis on high dimensional data such as features in video and image data streamed from sensors (2012-2013). In 2011-2012, I was a Postdoc Fellow of School of Computing, NUS, working on the UTab Project, under the supervision of Professor Beng Chin Ooi and Professor Y.C. Tay. He was a member of the DB System Research Group. From In June-Sep 2010, I was a visiting scholar at DKE, the University of Queensland, working with Professor Xiaofang Zhou on the data quality project. In Jun 2009-Nov 2009, I was very fortunate to do my summer internship at AT&T Research Lab, working with Dr. Divesh Srivastava on the Gigascope project. In 2006-2009, I was a teaching assistant at the school of computing, NUS.
Research Interests
I am highly interested in how to make data usable to data consumers, and make the implementation of such usability module as efficient and generalized as possible. In particular, I have been playing actively in:
Improving the Usability of Heterogeneous Cross-domain Data
- (Semi-)Structured data: relational, XML, spatial
- Unstructured data: text string
- Social network data (is NOT just a graph): modelling, management and analysis
- High-dimensional data: image, video, time-series trajectory
Research Topics:
- Data Exploration
- Spatio-Textual query processing
- Publisher/Subscriber over social media streams
- Real Time Personalized Search
Methodology:
(1) Keyword Search, (2) Query Relaxation/Suggestion, (3) Visualized Data Analytics,
(4) Exploratory Search Paradigm, (5) Provenance Data Storage and Tracking.
Awards
Singapore Infocomm Development Authority Medal and Prize
Best PhD Thesis Award of Class of 2011 (The only Winner)
Research Achievement Award - 2009
Best Paper Nomination:
The 33rd International Conference on Conceptual Modeling (ER 2014) - Best Student Paper Award Nomination
The 2013 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining (ASONAM)
The 25th International Conference on Data Engineering ( ICDE 2009)
System Demos
To make data usable in real life, I enjoy developing various system prototypes for most of the research ideas. Below is a snapshot.
XClearMap : Visualized & Exploratory Search with Interactive Input (SIGMOD 2015, new!)
ExpressQ : Interactive Keyword Search over Relational Data (WWW 2015, new!)
XClear : An XML keyword search engine with meaningful keyword suggestion functionality (SIGIR 2013)
sonSQL : An extensible relational DBMS for social network start-ups
XMAP : Exploring (Semi-)Structured Data is as easy as using Google Maps (CIKM 2013)
PTree: Provenance data storage and usability System for Relational Database (DASFAA 2011)
XReal : Interactive XML Keyword Search Engine
- User Search Target Prediction -> Search Constraint Identification -> Constraint-awared Result Ranking (CIKM 2010)
ICRA : Object-oriented Keyword Search Engine over Semi-structured data (DASFAA 2009)
Selected Professional Services (Full List)
PC Co-Chair:
APWeb 2016 (demo track)
XML-DM 2012
Program Committee of International Conferences:
2016 - IJCAI (Special Track on AI & Web), VLDB (demo track), ICDE (demo track), ICDE (TKDE Poster Track),
EDBT (demo track), BigComp, DASFAA
2015 - CIKM, BigComp, DASFAA, ER, DEXA
2014 - VLDB (demo track), CIKM (demo track), ER
2013 - DASFAA, ER
2012 - DASFAA, DEXA
Journal Invited Reviewer:
IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering(TKDE), 2009-present
The VLDB Journal, 2010-present
ACM Transactions on Information Technology (TOIT), 2014 - present
WWW Journal, 2014 - present