Project Support

This project is sponsored by National Science Foundation, IIS division, under the CAREER grant #00448264.

Project Description

The main goal of the project is to investigate approximation techniques to answer database aggregate queries with a particular emphasis on guaranteeing the performance of the approximation. The project has three main thrusts as of now. The main thrust is in the direction of designing "sketch" based approximation techniques that are practical and theoretical sound. The second thrust is to develop theoretical and practical understanding of efficient aggregate computation in "sensor networks". The same approximation principles and techniques as in the sketch work can be used for aggregation in distributed systems mainly using the fact that data-stream algorithms can be easily converted into distributed computation algorithms. The third thrust is towards developing analysis techniques for classification methods. While on the surface this last topic is not related to the first two, the same analysis techniques can be used with good success.

More details about the three lines of research can be found on the sub-projects page.

The project ended May 31, 2011