Ives, Zachary
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Disciplines
Computer Sciences
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Position
Assistant Professor
Introduction
Zachary Ives is an Assistant Professor at the University of Pennsylvania and an Associated Faculty Member of the Penn Center for Bioinformatics. He received his B.S. from Sonoma State University and his PhD from the University of Washington. His research interests include data integration, peer-to-peer models of data sharing, processing and security of heterogeneous sensor streams, and data exchange between autonomous systems. He is a recipient of the NSF CAREER award and a member of the DARPA Computer Science Study Panel.
Research Interests
Databases, data integration, peer-to-peer computing, sensor networks
Collection
43 results
Search Results
Now showing 1 - 10 of 43
Publication MOSAIC: Multiple Overlay Selection and Intelligent Composition(2007-10-24) Loo, Boon Thau; Ives, Zachary G; Mao, Yun; Smith, Jonathan MToday, the most effective mechanism for remedying shortcomings of the Internet, or augmenting it with new networking capabilities, is to develop and deploy a new overlay network. This leads to the problem of multiple networking infrastructures, each with independent advantages, and each developed in isolation. A greatly preferable solution is to have a single infrastructure under which new overlays can be developed, deployed, selected, and combined according to application and administrator needs. MOSAIC is an extensible infrastructure that enables not only the specification of new overlay networks, but also dynamic selection and composition of such overlays. MOSAIC provides declarative networking: it uses a unified declarative language (Mozlog) and runtime system to enable specification of new overlay networks, as well as their composition in both the control and data planes. Importantly, it permits dynamic compositions with both existing overlay networks and legacy applications. This paper demonstrates the dynamic selection and composition capabilities of MOSAIC with a variety of declarative overlays: an indirection overlay that supports mobility (i3), a resilient overlay (RON), and a transport-layer proxy. Using a remarkably concise specification, MOSAIC provides the benefits of runtime composition to simultaneously deliver application-aware mobility, NAT traversal and reliability with low performance overhead, demonstrated with deployment and measurement on both a local cluster and the PlanetLab testbed.Publication Interviewing During a Tight Job Market(2002-09-01) Ives, Zachary G; Luo, QiongVarious tips for interviewing for PhD graduates, seeking an academic position in a research university in Asia or North America are discussed. It is suggested that having the dissertation done before interviews gives a large degree of relief on one's mind. It is found that to be practical about job research package and keep a close eye on applications increases the confidence level. It is also observed that the questions during the talk provides opportunity to clarify and strengthen the talk and show this ability during the interview.Publication Update Exchange With Mappings and Provenance(2007-11-27) Green, Todd J; Karvounarakis, Grigoris; Ives, Zachary G; Tannen, ValWe consider systems for data sharing among heterogeneous peers related by a network of schema mappings. Each peer has a locally controlled and edited database instance, but wants to ask queries over related data from other peers as well. To achieve this, every peer’s updates propagate along the mappings to the other peers. However, this update exchange is filtered by trust conditions — expressing what data and sources a peer judges to be authoritative — which may cause a peer to reject another’s updates. In order to support such filtering, updates carry provenance information. These systems target scientific data sharing applications, and their general principles and architecture have been described in [21]. In this paper we present methods for realizing such systems. Specifically, we extend techniques from data integration, data exchange, and incremental view maintenance to propagate updates along mappings; we integrate a novel model for tracking data provenance, such that curators may filter updates based on trust conditions over this provenance; we discuss strategies for implementing our techniques in conjunction with an RDBMS; and we experimentally demonstrate the viability of our techniques in the Orchestra prototype system. This technical report supersedes the version which appeared in VLDB 2007 [17] and corrects certain technical claims regarding the semantics of our system (see errata in Sections [3.1] and [4.1.1]).Publication Reconciling while Tolerating Disagreement in Collaborative Data Sharing(2006-06-27) Taylor, Nicholas E; Ives, Zachary GIn many data sharing settings, such as within the biological and biomedical communities, global data consistency is not always attainable: different sites' data may be dirty, uncertain, or even controversial. Collaborators are willing to share their data, and in many cases they also want to selectively import data from others - but must occasionally diverge when they disagree about uncertain or controversial facts or values. For this reason, traditional data sharing and data integration approaches are not applicable, since they require a globally \emph{consistent} data instance. Additionally, many of these approaches do not allow participants to make updates; if they do, concurrency control algorithms or inconsistency repair techniques must be used to ensure a consistent view of the data for all users. In this paper, we develop and present a fully decentralized model of collaborative data sharing, in which participants publish their data on an ad hoc basis and simultaneously reconcile updates with those published by others. Individual updates are associated with provenance information, and each participant accepts only updates with a sufficient authority ranking, meaning that each participant may have a different (though conceptually overlapping) data instance. We define a consistency semantics for database instances under this model of disagreement, present algorithms that perform reconciliation for distributed clusters of participants, and demonstrate their ability to handle typical update and conflict loads in settings involving the sharing of curated data.Publication Sideways Information Passing for Push-Style Query Processing(2008-04-07) Ives, Zachary G; Taylor, Nicholas EIn many modern data management settings, data is queried from a central node or nodes, but is stored at remote sources. In such a setting it is common to perform "pushstyle" query processing, using multi-threaded pipelined hash joins and bushy query plans to compute parts of the query in parallel; to avoid idling, the CPU can switch between them as delays are encountered. This works well for simple select-project join queries, but increasingly, Web and integration applications require more complex queries with multiple joins and even nested subqueries. As we demonstrate in this paper, push-style execution of complex queries can be improved substantially via sideways information passing; push-style queries provide many opportunities for information passing that have not been studied in the past literature. We present adaptive information passing, a general runtime decision-making technique for reusing intermediate state from one query subresult to prune and reduce computation of other subresults. We develop two alternative schemes for performing adaptive information passing, which we study in several settings under a variety of workloads.Publication Updating XML(2001-05-21) Tatarinov, Igor; Ives, Zachary G; Halevy, Alon Y; Weld, Daniel SAs XML has developed over the past few years, its role has expanded beyond its original domain as a semantics-preserving markup language for online documents, and it is now also the de facto format for interchanging data between heterogeneous systems. Data sources export XML "views" over their data, and other systems can directly import or query these views. As a result, there has been great interest in languages and systems for expressing queries over XML data, whether the XML is stored in a repository or generated as a view over some other data storage format. Clearly, in order to fully evolve XML into a universal data representation and sharing format, we must allow users to specify updates to XML documents and must develop techniques to process them efficiently. Update capabilities are important not only for modifying XML documents, but also for propagating changes through XML views and for expressing and transmitting changes to documents. This paper begins by proposing a set of basic update operations for both ordered and unordered XML data. We next describe extensions to the proposed standard XML query language, XQuery, to incorporate the update operations. We then consider alternative methods for implementing update operations when the XML data is mapped into a relational database. Finally, we describe an experimental evaluation of the alternative techniques for implementing our extensions.Publication Quantifying Eavesdropping Vulnerability in Sensor Networks(2005-08-29) Anand, Madhukar; Ives, Zachary G; Lee, InsupWith respect to security, sensor networks have a number of considerations that separate them from traditional distributed systems. First, sensor devices are typically vulnerable to physical compromise. Second, they have significant power and processing constraints. Third, the most critical security issue is protecting the (statistically derived) aggregate output of the system, even if individual nodes may be compromised. We suggest that these considerations merit a rethinking of traditional security techniques: rather than depending on the resilience of cryptographic techniques, in this paper we develop new techniques to tolerate compromised nodes and to even mislead an adversary. We present our initial work on probabilistically quantifying the security of sensor network protocols, with respect to sensor data distributions and network topologies. Beginning with a taxonomy of attacks based on an adversary’s goals, we focus on how to evaluate the vulnerability of sensor network protocols to eavesdropping. Different topologies and aggregation functions provide different probabilistic guarantees about system security, and make different trade-offs in power and accuracy.Publication Schema Mediation in Peer Data Management Systems(2003-03-05) Halevy, Alon; Ives, Zachary G; Suciu, Dan; Tatarinov, IgorIntuitively, data management and data integration tools should be well-suited for exchanging information in a semantically meaningful way. Unfortunately, they suffer from two significant problems: they typically require a comprehensive schema design before they can be used to store or share information, and they are difficult to extend because schema evolution is heavyweight and may break backwards compatibility. As a result, many small-scale data sharing tasks are more easily facilitated by non-database-oriented tools that have little support for semantics. The goal of the peer data management system (PDMS) is to address this need: we propose the use of a decentralized, easily extensible data management architecture in which any user can contribute new data, schema information, or even mappings between other peers’ schemas. PDMSs represent a natural step beyond data integration systems, replacing their single logical schema with an interlinked collection of semantic mappings between peers’ individual schemas. This paper considers the problem of schema mediation in a PDMS. Our first contribution is a flexible language for mediating between peer schemas, which extends known data integration formalisms to our more complex architecture. We precisely characterize the complexity of query answering for our language. Next, we describe a reformulation algorithm for our language that generalizes both global-as-view and local-as-view query answering algorithms. Finally, we describe several methods for optimizing the reformulation algorithm, and an initial set of experiments studying its performance.Publication Reconcilable Differences(2009-03-23) Green, Todd J; Ives, Zachary G; Tannen, ValExact query reformulation using views in positive relational languages is well understood, and has a variety of applications in query optimization and data sharing. Generalizations to larger fragments of the relational algebra (RA) --- specifically, support for the difference operator --- would increase the options available for query reformulation, and also apply to view adaptation (updating a materialized view in response to a modified view definition) and view maintenance. Unfortunately, most questions about queries become undecidable in the presence of difference/negation. We present a novel way of managing this difficulty via an excursion through a non-standard semantics, Z-relations, where tuples are annotated with positive or negative integers. We show that under Z-semantics RA queries have a normal form as a single difference of positive queries and this leads to the decidability of equivalence. In most real-world settings with difference, it is possible to convert the queries to this normal form. We give a sound and complete algorithm that explores all reformulations of an RA query (under Z-semantics) using a set of RA views, finitely bounding the search space with a simple and natural cost model. We investigate related complexity questions, and we also extend our results to queries with built-in predicates. Z-relations are interesting in their own right because they capture updates and data uniformly. However, our algorithm turns out to be sound and complete also for bag semantics, albeit necessarily only for a subclass of RA. This subclass turns out to be quite large and covers generously the applications of interest to us. We also show a subclass of RA where reformulation and evaluation under Z-semantics can be combined with duplicate elimination to obtain the answer under set semantics.Publication Integrating Ontologies and Relational Data(2007-11-01) Auer, Sören; Ives, Zachary GIn recent years, an increasing number of scientific and other domains have attempted to standardize their terminology and provide reasoning capabilities through ontologies, in order to facilitate data exchange. This has spurred research into Web-based languages, formalisms, and especially query systems based on ontologies. Yet we argue that DBMS techniques can be extended to provide many of the same capabilities, with benefits in scalability and performance. We present OWLDB, a lightweight and extensible approach for the integration of relational databases and description logic based ontologies. One of the key differences between relational databases and ontologies is the high degree of implicit information contained in ontologies. OWLDB integrates the two schemes by codifying ontologies' implicit information using a set of sound and complete inference rules for SHOIN (the description logic behind OWL ontologies. These inference rules can be translated into queries on a relational DBMS instance, and the query results (representing inferences) can be added back to this database. Subsequently, database applications can make direct use of this inferred, previously implicit knowledge, e.g., in the annotation of biomedical databases. As our experimental comparison to a native description logic reasoner and a triple store shows, OWLDB provides significantly greater scalability and query capabilities, without sacrifcing performance with respect to inference.

