Alin Dobra

Associate Professor,
Department of Computer & Information Science & Engineering
University of Florida

adobra at cise dot ufl dot edu
Phone: 352 392-2722; Fax: 352 392-1220
Office: E434 CSE Building
Office Hours: Wednesday 1pm-3pm or by appointment

Woodworking/Hobby Web page

Database Group Prospective Students Short Biography Old Webpage

My main research interests are approximate processing of database queries and foundations of data-mining/machine learning. In terms of approximate query processing, I have wide interests into most approximation techniques: histograms, sampling and sketches with an emphasis of developing a general theory of approximation for database queries. The interest in foundational data-mining is mostly focused on bridging the gap between Statistics and data-mining by developing semi-analytical models to explain the behavior of learning methods.

I am a member of the Database Group

Recent Publications

Florin Rusu, Alin Dobra. Statistical Analysis of Sketch Estimators. To appear in SIGMOD 2007. (pdf)
Christopher Jermaine, Subramanian Arumugam, Abhijit Pol, Alin Dobra. Scalable Approximate Query Processing with the DBO Engine. To appear in SIGMOD 2007. (pdf) Best Paper Award
Florin Rusu, Alin Dobra. Pseudo-random Number Generation for Sketch-Based Estimations. ACM TODS (pdf)
Ye Xia, Alin Dobra, Seung Chul Han. Multiple-Choice Random Network for Server Load Balancing. To appear in INFOCOM 2007(pdf)
Florin Rusu, Alin Dobra. Fast range-summable random variables for efficient aggregate estimation. SIGMOD 2006(pdf)
Chris Jermaine, Alin Dobra, Subramanian Arumugam, Shantanu Joshi, Abhijit Pol: The Sort-Merge-Shrink join. ACM TODS(pdf)

Full Publication List (with abstracts) DBLP

Funding

My work on approximate query processing is funded by an NSF CAREER award.

Selected Professional Activities

Program Committee member of: KDD 2007, VLDB 2007 (and numerous other conferences in the past)
Organizer of First Bertinoro Workshop on Data-mining (October 2005)

PhD Students

Teaching (recent)

COP 5725, Database Management Systems, Spring 2008
CIS 4301, Information and Database Systems I, Fall 2007
COT 5405, Analysis of Algorithms, Spring 2007
COP 5725, Database Management Systems, Fall 2006
COP 6930, Approximate Query Processing, Spring 2006
COP 5725, Database Management Systems, Fall 2005