Li (Eric) Qian

I'm a Ph.D. candidate advised by Prof. Jagadish at the Database Group, University of Michigan. My research focues on Database Usability, e.g., how to make database systems easy to use, esp. for non-technical users, in the context of schema design, schema evolution and schema mapping.

» Incremental Information Integration. Li Qian, Lucian Popa, Mauricio A. Hernandez. In preparation.

» Sample-Driven Schema Mapping. Li Qian, Michael J. Cafarella, H. V. Jagadish. In SIGMOD, 2012.

» CRIUS: User-Friendly Database Design. Li Qian, Kristen LeFevre, H. V. Jagadish. In PVLDB, 2011.

I obtained my B.E. from Chu Kochen Honors College of Zhejiang University in 2008. During my undergraduate study I exchanged to the University of Hong Kong for the full acedemic year of 2007. After that I continued to graduate study at University of Michigan, where I received my M.S. and Ph.D. candidancy in Computer Science in 2010.

» My recent work investigates a new schema mapping approach, which reduces user burden for end-users to incorporate external data sources into their own data collections. Our approach automatically deduces the desired schema mapping, by searching and pruning mapping candidates based on user-provided sample target instance data. This work is published in SIGMOD 2012.

» During the summer of 2011, I interned at IBM Almaden Research Center, working in the MIDAS group on very large data integration with HIL (High-level Integration Language). I augmented HIL with incremental integration execution. By maintaining previous execution results and processing them with incremental integration rules, HIL now offers much better overall performance.

» In the PVLDB paper, I proposed a schema evolution algebra and designed a corresponding direct manipulation interface. I also studied how integrity-constraints can dynamically ease user data entry in a spread-sheet-like environment.

» I participated in the project of PViz, which aims to visualize privacy settings for social network users. I designed and implemented the initial user interface, and set up the user study environment.

» I built TypeSQL, a subset of SQL including all the essential SQL syntax and enabled it with semantic type checking. The checking is completely static and proved to be sound. I also implemented the type checker for TypeSQL so that semantic errors can be caught prior to execution.

» I am involved in M-PIM (Michigan Personal Information Manager), a project on making next-generation contact books in mobile devices more usable. In 2009, I was mentoring an undergraduate student on basic programming skills and database fundamentals for this project. We successfully built a prototype of the next-generation contact books on the Android Platform.

» I graduated from Zhejiang University in 2008, with a final year project on object tracking in video sequences using particle filters. In this project, I implemented, simulated and analyzed several variations of particle filters based on the Sequential Importance Sampling framework.

» During the summer of 2007, I worked with Prof. David W.L. Cheung at the Center of E-Commerce Infrastructure Development at the University of Hong Kong, surveying commercial mapping tools and their technical backbone in information interoperability, schema transformation and model mapping. I also implemented a tool for XML schema visualization.