2012.01.24

On Friday 3 February Matteo Magnani will give a Computer Science Friday Lecture on:

Selecting stars: representative skylines for finding interesting records under multiple criteria

Abstract:
Which basketball player has been the Most Valuable Player of the last NBA season? Which materials should we use to build in a short time a product that is cheap but is still appreciated by our customers? Which hotels are cheap but also not too far from the beach?

These are all examples of queries involving multiple criteria, e.g.,

cost and
distance to the beach.

Only if the importance of each criterion is known (how far am I willing to walk for each saved kr.?) we can compute a ranking of the best records (hotels). Otherwise, the skyline consists of all the best records for all possible weighing of the criteria, thereby giving an overview over all the best options in the data.

In this talk I will introduce the skyline database operator for the selection of records under multiple criteria. Then I will discuss one important limitation of this operator: the fact that the result of a skyline query can be very large. I will thus present the main status of the research on selecting "stars", i.e., a small set of records providing a good representation of the whole skyline.

About the speaker:
Matteo Magnani graduated in Computer Science at the University of Bologna in 2002 (110/110 with mention). He studied at the University of Marne la Vallée (undergraduate level) and the Imperial College London (postgraduate research level). In 2006 he obtained a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Bologna and in 2011 he graduated in Violin at the Conservatory of Bologna (110/110 with mention). Currently he has a postdoc position at the level of research assistant professor at the Research Center for Intensive Data Systems, Department of Computer Science, Aarhus University, Denmark.

He has received a Rotary Prize for the best student of the Science Faculty (UniBO), a Best Paper Award at the International Conference on Social Network Analysis and Mining, the French qualification for Maître de Conférence positions and the Italian idoneità for CNR researcher positions.

He is currently involved in the WallViz research project working on multi-criteria decision making operators and is the joint coordinator of the #sigsna research group on social network analysis. The #sigsna group is (or has been) funded by funding schemes Working Capital (Telecom Italia), PRIN and FIRB (MIUR - Italian Ministry for education, university and research). Homepage

Coffee and cake at 14:00 - the talk begins at 14:15