Spotlight: Alexandros Labrinidis, Assistant Professor
Congratulations to our Assistant Professor,
Alexandros Labrinidis,
who is a recipient of the NSF's prestigious CAREER Award.
The Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program is a Foundation-wide activity that offers the National Science Foundation's most prestigious awards in support of the early career-development activities of those teacher-scholars who most effectively integrate research and education within the context of the mission of their organization.
Dr. Labrinidis' award makes the sixth such award for the Pitt and the second such award
for our Department this year.
Dr. Labrinidis' proposed research activities focus on user-centric data management. In particular, he plans to make database-driven web sites more ``tailorable'' to the preferences of users. As the Internet becomes more widespread and its users (and content) more diverse, the need for personalization is expected to increase dramatically. To address this need, Dr. Labrinidis aims to (1) expose quality information from Web data sources, (2) empower users to specify their preferences for the different dimensions of quality through an intuitive framework, called Quality Agreements, and (3) devise ways to influence resource allocation decisions according to user preferences. Towards this, the project will reexamine traditional query processing techniques in order to consider user preferences and also address new challenges, stemming from the users' need to adapt their preferences over time and their ability to collaborate. Dr. Labrinidis' proposed project activities include a validation component of the Quality Agreements framework through a user study, the evaluation of the proposed algorithms analytically and experimentally, and development of prototypes. The experimental aspects of this research will generate many opportunities for graduate, undergraduate, and high-school students to participate in the research and development of new technologies. Results of this research, including software, data, and publications, will be made publicly available via the project web site (http://db.cs.pitt.edu/user-centric).
Dr. Labrinidis is the co-director of the Advanced Data Management Technologies Laboratory (ADMT Lab) which compasses a wide range of projects, from Data Management for Sensor Networks, to Data Stream Management Systems, to Scientific Data Management, to Wed Databases. The ADMT Lab was established in 1995, through the NSF CAREER award of the other co-director of the Lab, Dr. Panos K. Chrysanthis (1995 was actually the year the NSF CAREER Award mechanism was established).
Press clippings: