Last updated: 2018

Past Projects

Neural Debugging

The aim of this project was to build tools to help engineers understand and debug neural networks with statistical methods. See our SysML paper for an overview and our SIGMOD paper for the details. This was a collaboration with Kevin Lin, Ian Huang, Eugene Wu (Columbia) and Carl Vondrick (Google Research).

Precision Interfaces

We built a system to generate user interfaces automatically by mining SQL query logs and navigational data. This was a collaboration with Qianrui Zhang (Columbia), Haoci Zhang (Tsinghua) and Eugene Wu (Columbia). See our SIGMOD paper for an overview.

Secret Sauce

We built statistical models to help musicians tune their synthesizers and guitar effects. We operated by example: give the model a sound, and it will tell how to recreate it. See an overview of the project here and our first results here. The project is still ongoing.

My PhD project: Automatic Advisors for Data Exploration

The aim of my PhD was to develop automatic advisors, to help users explore and understand their databases. These advisors could detect statistical patterns, and exploit them to recommend queries and visualizations. For instance, Blaeu [TKDE 2015] would use cluster analysis and subspace search to create navigable maps of the data.

Some of the the ideas in the thesis were implemented in a R package called findviews, available on CRAN. Check it out!

Social Data Analytics

The aim of this project was to model search query logs and Twitter data to detect experts on social media. This project has been ongoing since my internship at Microsoft Research, during summer of 2014 in Mountain View (CA). Then, I was under supervised by Omar Alonso, at Bing.

Timetrails - Traffic Data Analysis

The aim of this project was to develop database and forecasting technology to analyze large repositories of GPS data. This project was collaboration with TomTom.

MonetDB

MonetDB is a very fast Open Source column-store.