[DB Seminar] Spring 2016: Vladimir I. Zadorozhny

Information fusion deals with reconstructing objects from multiple, possibly incomplete and inconsistent observations. The task of scalable information fusion is critical for interdisciplinary research where a comprehensive picture of the subject requires large amounts of data from disparate data sources. Despite its increasing availability, making sense of such data is not trivial.

In this talk I will elaborate on challenges in developing an infrastructure that facilitates scalable information integration and fusion. I will introduce an efficient framework that enables systematic information fusion in different application domains. In particular, I will consider how concepts of information fusion and crowdsourcing complement each other and accelerate novel research directions in scalable information sensemaking. I will explore each of those concepts and their synergy under scenarios of large-scale historical data integration and situation assessment in multi-robot search and rescue.

Short Bio: Vladimir Zadorozhny (www.sis.pitt.edu/~vladimir) is an Associate Professor of Information Sciences at the University of Pittsburgh School of Information Sciences. He received his Ph.D. in 1993 from the Institute for Problems of Informatics, Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow. Before coming to USA he was a Principal Research Scientist in the Institute of System Programming, Russian Academy of Sciences. Since 1998 he worked as a Research Associate in the University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies at College Park. He joined University of Pittsburgh in 2001. His research interests include information integration and fusion, complex adaptive systems and crowdsourcing, query optimization in resource-constrained distributed environments, and scalable architectures for wide-area environments with heterogeneous information servers. His research has been supported by NSF, EU and Norwegian Research Council. He is a recipient of Fulbright Scholarship for 2014-2015.  Vladimir has received several best paper awards and has chaired and served on program committees of multiple Database and Distributed Computing Conferences and Workshops.