Title: "Entity-Centric Data Management"
  ABSTRACT           
Until recently, structured (e.g., relational) and unstructured (e.g., textual) data were managed very differently; Structured data was queried declaratively using languages such as SQL, while unstructured data was searched using boolean queries over inverted indices. Today, we witness the rapid emergence of entity-centric techniques to bridge the gap between different types of content and manage both unstructured and structured data more effectively. I will start this talk by giving a few examples of entity-centric data management. I will then describe two recent systems that were built in my lab and revolve around entity-centric data management techniques: ZenCrowd, a socio-technical platform that automatically connects HTML pages to semi-structured entities, and TripleProv, a scalable, efficient, and provenance-enabled back-end to manage graphs of entities.

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
Philippe Cudre-Mauroux is a Swiss-NSF Professor and the director of the eXascale Infolab at the University of Fribourg in Switzerland. Previously, he was a postdoctoral associate working in the Database Systems group at MIT. He received his Ph.D. from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology EPFL, where he won both the Doctorate Award and the EPFL Press Mention in 2007. Before joining the University of Fribourg, he worked on distributed information and media management for HP, IBM Watson Research (NY), and Microsoft Research Asia. His research interests are in next-generation, Big Data management infrastructures for non-relational data. Webpage: http://exascale.info/phil.