Keynote
in
Workshop: Table Representation Learning

Alon Halevy - "Structured Data Inside and Out"

Alon Halevy

2022 Keynote
in
Workshop: Table Representation Learning

Abstract

WebTables contain high-quality data that is relevant to many queries on search engines. Since they are embedded inside web pages, understanding the semantics of tables requires analyzing the text surrounding them on the page. This talk will begin by recalling some of the early challenges we faced with the WebTables Project at Google. I will then turn to a different kind of challenge at the intersection of structured and unstructured data, where the structured data is outside and the unstructured data is inside. For example, when modeling a set of events in a person’s life (or history of an enterprise or a culture), each event is described in text and other media, but the event is also associated with structured data such as time and location. Answering questions over such collections of data requires leveraging the structure in the data appropriately. In the second half of the will discuss the motivations, challenges and partial solutions to dealing with structured data that is on the outside.

Speaker

Alon Halevy

Alon Halevy has been a director at Meta AI (and most recently, Reality Labs Research) since 2019, where he works on Human Value Alignment , the combination of neural and symbolic techniques for data management and responsible personal information management. Prior to Facebook, Alon was the CEO of Megagon Labs (2015-2018) and led the Structured Data Research Group at Google Research (2005-2015), where the team developed WebTables and Google Fusion Tables. From 1998 to 2005 he was a professor at the University of Washington, where he founded the database group. Alon is a founder of two startups, Nimble Technology and Transformic Inc. (acquired by Google in 2005). He received his Ph.D in Computer Science from Stanford in 1993. Alon co-authored two books: The Infinite Emotions of Coffee and Principles of Data Integration. He is a Fellow of the ACM and a recipient of the PECASE award and Sloan Fellowship. Together with his co-authors, he received VLDB 10-year best paper awards for the 2008 paper on WebTables and for the 1996 paper on the Information Manifold data integration system. In 2021, he received the Edgar F. Codd SIGMOD Innovations Award.

Video

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