DB - 1 Mobile Data Management for the Future

NICTA Project - Dr Raymond Wong (wong@cse.unsw.edu.au) and William Shui (bill.shui@nicta.com.au)

The aim of this project is to allow computer data (of various formats) to be stored and processed in a succinct representation: a space-efficient representation which also maintains low access and update costs for all of the processing operations. This is essential for devices with limited resources such as smart phones, PDA, and sensor networks. Basic research has been completed and preliminary prototype demonstrated has been implemented. Based on the current result, the project involves further development of the project in Linux or Windows (preferred) for handheld devices and mobile phones. The candidate will work with a team of researchers, PhD students and collaborators from industry.

The outcome of the project will be an improved version of the current prototype such that it will allow more efficient querying and processing of data in mobile devices. The basis of the underlying data structure and techniques will be simplified for training and accelerate future development building upon our system. Finally, the outcome shall easily allow different applications to be integrated with our system. This project can further be extended and become part of an honours thesis or postgraduate research thesis. Knowledge from foundation database plus computer networking courses is required. Basic knowledge of XML is desirable but not required. C/C++ or Java. Programming experience in Windows or Pocket PC is desirable but not required.

For further information, please contact one of the supervisors; commercial collaborators of the project include http://www.greenpea.net

DB - 2 Cooperative Query Processing for XML

NICTA Project - Dr Raymond Wong (wong@cse.unsw.edu.au) and Franky Lam (franky.lam@nicta.com.au)

Semistructured data, such as XML, allows users to structure a document in a way which precisely captures the semantics of the data. This, however, poses a substantial barrier to casual and non-expert users who wish to query such data, as it is the data's structure which forms the basis of all XML query languages. Without an accurate understanding of this structure, users are unable to issue meaningful queries. This problem is compounded when one realizes that data adhering to different schema are likely to be contained within the same data warehouse or across multiple enterprise databases. This project is to develop a mechanism for meaningfully querying such data with no prior knowledge of its structure. The candidate will work with a team of researchers, PhD students and collaborators from industry.

The project will be based on the research result that has been taken place in our research group in the past few years. It can be adjusted and extended according to the student interests. The system shall return approximate answers to such a query over semistructured data such as XML data, and can return useful results even if a specific query value cannot be matched. This project can further be extended and become part of an honours thesis or postgraduate research thesis. Knowledge from a foundation database course is required. Basic knowledge of XML is highly desirable but not compulsory. C/C++ or Java. Programming experience in Windows or Pocket PC is desirable but not required.

For further information, please contact one of the supervisors.

DB - 3 Compression of XML Documents

NICTA Project - Dr. Sebastian Maneth (smaneth@cse.unsw.edu.au)

Most data on the web is interchanged using the XML. Surprisingly, not many good compression tools for XML documents exist yet.

The goal of this summer project is to implement a tool for XML compression. The idea of the tool is to seperate the structure of the XML document from its data content, and to compress each of them seperately using an appropriate state-of-the-art compression method (for text data, e.g., this could be BWZ as used by bzip). The project's novelty is a new space-efficient separation schemes for tree and text data in XML documents.

The project is in collaboration with a team of international researchers and students. An expected outcome of the research is implementation of a new XML compression tool!

For further information, please contact the supervisor or look for XMill and BPLEX.

DB - 4 A Smart Agent-Driven Database Event Tracking System

CSE Project - Associate Professor Albert Nymeyer (anymeyer@cse.unsw.edu.au) and Dr Nandan Paramesh (paramesh@cse.unsw.edu.au)

A system is being developed in CSE that tracks student enquiries including applications for admission. The interesting aspect of the system is that it is event-driven, and that it manages `processes', rather than being just a `dumb' database. Being event-driven means it knows about and logs events like `application received'. Managing processes means it knows what the next event should be, and who is responsible, no matter what happens. The system keeps everyone fully informed where a `process' (e.g. a query) is at, and what needs to happen next.

Agents are smart software program modules that extract information from their environment, reason about this knowledge, and perform some action, like responding to some event that changes the environment. The information driving agents is declaratively coded and interpreted in a cooperative manner.

This smart, agent-based approach will take on the daily responsibilities of managing a service like handling student enquiries. Students benefit because their queries and requests are handled very fast. The school benefits because only in unusual circumstances will human intervention be required: the system handles all routine queries. The system has a very large number of applications outside the school as well. An expected outcome of the research is a smart tracking system.

For further information, please contact the supervisor.

DB - 5 Near Duplicate Object Detection

CSE Project - Dr Wei Wang (weiw@cse.unsw.edu.au)

This project aims to build a system that can detect near duplicate documents (or tuples) in a large document repository (or database). Near-duplicate documents are causing serious problems in web search, enterprise document/knowledge management, and can also act as an indispensable module for automated text document processing. Finding duplicate tuples in databases is important to data integration applications too.

In this project, you will learn and implement some of the latest technology in near duplicate object detection, implement the system, and experiment various solutions on real datasets.

This project requires good programming skills and knowledge in data structures and algorithms. A potential outcome of the research includes building an effective and efficient near duplicate object detection system. For further information, please contact the supervisor or consider http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~weiw/ToR2006.html

DB - 6 2^{google}

CSE Project - Dr Wei Wang (weiw@cse.unsw.edu.au)

This project aims to build a search engine that beats google, :p While google has done a great job in bringing most relevant html pages to us with respect to a set of query keywords, it cannot help you if the keywords you searched are located in *more than one* pages provided that these pages are closely connected. In this project, we will look into a few alternatives which can address the above problem. One of the challenges is the scalability of the solution as we definitely need to deal with millions of web pages.

This project is definitely practical, and requires good programming experience, and a lot of passions. A potential outcome of the research is the building of a new-generation search engine

For further information, please contact the supervisor or consider http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~weiw/ToR2006.html

DB - 7 Web Search for e-Commerce Web Sites

CSE Project - Dr Wei Wang (weiw@cse.unsw.edu.au)

This project aims to build a system that provides easy-to-digest search results for e-Commerce web sites.

Background: Consider a search in one online real estate web site. Typically, a large number of results will be returned. Can we process the results such that it becomes easier to browse? One idea is to "rank" them according to the "preferences" of the users.

In this project, you will learn and implement some of the latest technology in web search and ranking, implement web site crawler (i.e., bot), and experiment various solutions on real datasets.

This project requires good programming skills. Knowledge in databases, data mining/machine learning will be a plus. A potential outcome of the research is the building of a more user-friendly and intelligent e-Commerce web site. For more information, please contact the potential supervisor or consider http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~weiw/ToR2006.html

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