Weiyi Meng, State University of New York at Binghamton

• Title: Web Database Query Interface Modeling, Construction and Integration
• Abstract
  The Web consists of millions of databases accessible through special Web query interfaces. In the past 15 years, there have been much efforts in developing techniques to make the data in these databases accessible in an integrated manner. There are two leading paradigms in achieving such an integrated access – Surfacing and Metasearching. Surfacing applies deep crawling techniques to collect data from these Web databases and indexes them just like regular Web pages for centralized search. Metasearching provides a mechanism to interact with multiple Web databases and gather results from them for each query in an integrated manner on the fly. This talk reviews some of the enabling techniques for the metasearching paradigm, including Web database query interface modeling, interface schema construction and integration. It provides the before and after contexts for the work presented in the WISE 2005 paper that is selected to receive the prestigious 10+ Year Test-of-Time Best Paper Award of the WISE Conference Series. That paper was about automatic construction of query interface schemas of Web databases.
• Biography
  Weiyi Meng is currently a professor and the chair of the Computer Science Department, State University of New York at Binghamton. He was Interim Associate Dean for Research and Graduate Studies of the Thomas J. Watson School of Engineering and Applied Science from August 2014 to June 2016. He received his Ph.D. in computer science from University of Illinois at Chicago in 1992. His research interests include metasearch engines, Web database integration, Internet-based information retrieval, Web data quality, Web information extraction, sentiment analysis, and database management systems. He has done pioneering work in large-scale metasearch engines and Web database integration systems. He is the co-author of three books (Principles of Database Query Processing for Advanced Applications, Advanced Metasearch Engine Technology and Deep Web Query Interface Understanding and Integration). He has published over 150 papers and many of them in top conferences and journals in his research areas. He has served as a member of the program/organizing committees of more than 100 international conferences, as a conference/program committee chair for some of them. He has also served on the editorial boards of several journals.