News & Events

The following papers have been accepted to ICDT 2025:

• "A Formal Language Perspective on Factorized Representations" by Benny Kimelfeld, Wim Martens, and Matthias Niewerth
• "Repairing Databases over Metric Spaces with Coincidence Constraints" by Youri Kaminsky, Benny Kimelfeld, Ester Livshits, Felix Naumann, and David Wajc

Congratulations to all authors!

Brit Youngmann co-chaired the First Workshop on Governance, Understanding, and Integration of Data for Effective and Responsible AI (GUIDE-AI) alongside Abolfazl Asudeh, Sainyam Galhorta, Amir Gilad, and Babak Salimi. The workshop was held in conjunction with SIGMOD 2024.

The following demo was presented at SIGMOD 24: Markos Markakis, An Bo Chen, Brit Youngmann, Trinity Gao, Ziyu Zhang, Rana Shahout, Peter Baile Chen, Chunwei Liu, Ibrahim Sabek, Michael Cafarella: Sawmill: From Logs to Causal Diagnosis of Large Systems.

The following journal papers were published:

• Benny Kimelfeld, Phokion G. Kolaitis: A Unifying Framework for Incompleteness, Inconsistency, and Uncertainty in Databases. Communications of the ACM 67(3): 74-83 (2024).
• Ben Perach, Ronny Ronen, Benny Kimelfeld, Shahar Kvatinsky: Understanding Bulk-Bitwise Processing In-Memory Through Database Analytics. IEEE Transactions Emerg. Top. Comput. 12(1): 7-22 (2024)

These demos were presented at VLDB 2024:

• Dean Light, Ahmad Aiashi, Mahmoud Diab, Daniel Nachmias, Stijn Vansummeren, Benny Kimelfeld: SpannerLib: Embedding Declarative Information Extraction in an Imperative Workflow.
• Eugenie Lai, Yuze Lou, Brit Youngmann, Michael Cafarell: LucidScript: Bottom-yp Standardization for Data Preparation.

The following papers were accepted to VLDB 2025:

1. Shunit Agmon, Amir Gilad, Brit Youngmann, Shahar Zoarets, Benny Kimelfeld: Finding Convincing Views to Endorse a Claim.
2. Yuxi Liu, Fangzhu Shen, Kushagra Ghosh, Amir Gilad, Benny Kimelfeld, Sudeepa Roy: The Cost of Representation by Subset Repairs.
3. Markos Markakis, Brit Youngmann, Trinity Gao, Ziyu Zhang, Rana Shahout, Peter Baile Chen, Chunwei Liu, Ibrahim Sabek, Michael Cafarella: From Logs to Causal Inference: Diagnosing Large Systems.

Well done!

Finally, we managed to hold a laboratory meeting, in which the soldiers among us also participated. There were interesting lectures, delicious refreshments, and we are waiting for the next meeting :)

The paper "Summarized Causal Explanation for Aggregate Views" by Brit Youngmann, Michael Cafarella, Amir Gilad, and Sudeepa Roy, was accepted to SIGMOD'24.

The paper "NEXUS: On Explaining Confounding Bias" by Brit Youngmann, Michale Cafarella, Yuval Moskovitch and Babak Salimi, appeared at SIGMOD'23.

The paper "Causal Data Integration" by Brit Youngmann, Michale Cafarella, Babak Salimi, and Anna Zeng, appeared at VLDB'23.

The paper "On Explaining Confounding Bias" by Brit Youngmann, Michale Cafarella, Yuval Moskovitch and Babak Salimi, appeared at ICDE'23.

The paper "Skyline Operators for Document Spanners" by Antoine Amarilli, Benny Kimelfeld, Sébastien Labbé and Stefan Mengel, was accepted to ICDT 2024.

Two papers just presented at AAAI 2024:

• Alon Mor; Yonatan Belinkov; Benny Kimelfeld: Accelerating the Global Aggregation of Local Explanations
• Aviram Imber; Jonas Israel; Markus Brill; Hadas Shachnai; Benny Kimelfeld: Spatial Voting with Incomplete Voter Information

The paper "Database Repairing with Soft Functional Dependencies" by Nofar Carmeli, Martin Grohe, Benny Kimelfeld, Ester Livshits, and Muhammad Tibi, was accepted to ACM Transactions on Database Systems (TODS).

The paper "A Unifying Framework for Incompleteness, Inconsistency, and Uncertainty in Databases" by Benny Kimelfeld and Phokion G. Kolaitis, was published at Communications of the ACM (CACM).

The paper "A Dataset for Metaphor Detection in Early Medieval Hebrew Poetry" by Michael Toker, Yonatan Belinkov, Oren Mishali, Ophir Münz-manor and Benny Kimelfeld, was accepted to EACL.

The paper "The Birth of a New Discipline: Data Science Education" by Koby Mike, Benny Kimelfeld, and Orit Hazzan, was published at Harvard Data Science Review.

The paper "Selecting Walk Schemes for Database Embedding" by Yuval Lubarsky, Jan Tönshof, Martin Grohe and Benny Kimelfeld, was accepted to the International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM 2023).

Oren Mishali, our Lab Engineer, gave a lecture in the 3rd Online Conference for Software and Data. Oren talked about "Building a Semantic Search Model for Internet Rabbinic Q&A".

Jonas Israel from TU-Berlin visited in the Technion. Jonas has been a collaborator of Benny and Aviram during the past two years. We seized the opportunity to dine out at a restaurant :)

Aviram Imber will present in the upcoming 9th International Workshop on Computational Social Choice (COMSOC 2023) the paper “Finding Possible and Necessary Winners in Spatial Voting with Partial Information” by Aviram Imber (Technion); Jonas Israel (TU Berlin); Markus Brill (University of Warwick); Hadas Shachnai (Technion); Benny Kimelfeld (Technion).

The following papers were accepted to ICDT 2024:

• "Skyline Operators for Document Spanners" by Antoine Amarilli, Benny Kimelfeld, Sébastien Labbé and Stefan Mengel.
• "Direct Access for Answers to Conjunctive Queries with Aggregation" by Idan Eldar, Nofar Carmeli and Benny Kimelfeld, we accepted to ICDT 2024.

The paper "Complexity of the Shapley Value for Regular Path Queries" by Majd Khalil and Benny Kimelfeld was accepted to the International Conference on Database Theory (ICDT 2023).

The paper "Exploration of Knowledge Graphs via Online Aggregation" by Oren Kalinsky, Aidan Hogan, Oren Mishali, Yoav Etsion, and Benny Kimelfeld, was accepted to the International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE 2022).

A tool developed in the lab as part of the "Jewish Bookshelf Project" was selected as one of the "Honorable Mentions" in the Sefaria 2021 contest. From the contest's site: "An innovative tool that helps users search for sources by quotations. On selecting a set of verses, the site generates a list of texts that quote verses from the set. This tool provides an different way to quickly find relevant sources - sorting results by their relationship to a specific verse rather than topic or text." A link to the tool - try it out!

The paper "Gender-sensitive word embeddings for healthcare" by Shunit Agmon, Plia Gillis, Eric Horvitz, and Kira Radinsky, was published in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association (JAMIA).

The paper "Computing the Shapley Value of Facts in Query Answering" by Daniel Deutch, Nave Frost, Benny Kimelfeld, and Mikaël Monet, was accepted to SIGMOD 2022.

The paper "Approval-Based Committee Voting under Incomplete Information" by Aviram Imber, Jonas Israel, Markus Brill, and Benny Kimelfeld, was accepted to AAAI 2022.

We congratulate our lab head, Benny Kimelfeld, on being promoted to full professor.

The paper "Properties of Inconsistency Measures for Databases" by Ester Livshits, Rina Kochirgan, Segev Tsur, Ihab Ilyas, Benny Kimelfeld, and Sudeepa Roy, was accepted to SIGMOD 2021.

The paper "Tractable Orders for Direct Access to Ranked Answers of Conjunctive Queries" by Nofar Carmeli, Nikolaos Tziavelis, Wolfgang Gatterbauer, Benny Kimelfeld, and Mirek Riedewald, was accepted to PODS 2021.

We congratulate our student Dr. Nofar Carmeli for receiving her PhD.

Two papers were accepted to the 20th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS 2021):

Four papers were accepted to the International Conference on Database Theory (ICDT) 2021: The Shapley Value of Inconsistency Measures for Functional Dependencies, by Ester Livshits and Benny Kimelfeld. The Complexity of Aggregates over Extractions by Regular Expressions, by Johannes Doleschal, Noa Bratman, Benny Kimelfeld and Wim Martens. Database Repairing with Soft Functional Dependencies, by Nofar Carmeli, Martin Grohe, Benny Kimelfeld, Ester Livshits and Muhammad Tibi. Uniform Reliability of Self-Join-Free Conjunctive Queries, by Antoine Amarilli and Benny Kimelfeld. Well done!

The paper "Counting Subset Repairs with Functional Dependencies" by Ester Livshits, Benny Kimelfeld and Jef Wijsen, was accepted to the Journal of Computer and System Sciences (JCSS).

This week, our lab engineer Oren Mishali, together with Moshe Schor (Technion) and Ophir Münz-Manor (Open University of Israel), have presented (virtually) the paper "VIS-À-VIS: Detecting Similar Patterns in Annotated Literary Text" in the 5th Workshop on Visualization for the Digital Humanities (VIS4DH), which is part of the IEEE VIS2020 conference.

We congratulate Shai Zeevi for receiving his bachelor's degree (summa cum laude), and his master's degree, both on the same day. Well done Shai!

The CS Department celebrated (virtually) the graduation of 315 students. Benny Kimelfeled, our head lab and Vice Dean for Undergraduate Studies, conducted the event together with actor and comedian Idan Alterman.

The paper "Tuple-Independent Representations of Infinite Probabilistic Databases" by Nofar Carmeli, Martin Grohe, Peter Lindner and Christoph Standke was accepted for presentation at PODS 2021.

The paper "Efficiently Enumerating Minimal Triangulations" by Nofar Carmeli, Batya Kenig, Benny Kimelfeld, and Markus Kröll, was accepted for publication in Discrete Applied Mathematics in a special issue for WEPA 2018 (Workshop on Enumeration Problems and Applications).

The paper "Counting and Enumerating Preferred Database Repairs" by Benny Kimelfeld, Ester Livshits, and Liat Peterfreund, was accepted to the Theoretical Computer Science journal.

The paper "Approximate Denial Constraints", by Ester Livshits, Alireza Heidari, Ihab F. Ilyas, and Benny Kimelfeld, was accepted to the PVLDB journal.

The paper "Answering (Unions of) Conjunctive Queries using Random Access and Random-Order Enumeration" by Nofar Carmeli, Shai Zeevi, Christoph Berkholz, Benny Kimelfeld and Nicole Schweikardt, was accepted to PODS 2020.

The paper "The Impact of Negation on the Complexity of the Shapley Value in Conjunctive Queries" by Alon Reshef, Benny Kimelfeld and Ester Livshits, was accepted to PODS 2020.

The paper Weight Annotation in Information Extraction by Johannes Doleschal, Benny Kimelfeld, Wim Martens and Liat Peterfreund, was accepted to the 23rd International Conference on Database Theory ICDT 2020.

The GIF (German-Israeli Foundation) board of governors has awarded a grant to the project entitled "Splitting Information Extraction: Correctness and Complexity",  in collaboration with Prof. Wim Martens.

The paper Chemical and textual embeddings for drug repurposing by Galia Nordon, Levi Gottlieb, and Kira Radinsky, was accepted to the thirty-second annual conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence (IAAI-20).

The paper "Learning to Generate Personalized Product Descriptions" by Guy Elad, Ido Guy, Kira Radinsky, Slava Novgorodov, and Benny Kimelfeld, was accepted to CIKM 2019.

Ester Livshits' research won the first place in the research day that took place in the CS faculty on June 24th. Well done Ester!

The paper "The Shapley Value of Tuples in Query Answering" by Ester Livshits, Leopoldo Bertossi, Benny Kimelfeld and Moshe Sebag, was accepted to ICDT 2020.

Nofar Carmeli and Muhammad Tibi have won the SIGMOD/PODS 2019 student travel award. Congratulations!

This week we have a visitor from University of Bayreuth: Johannes Doleschal. Johannes is a PhD student and he gave a talk about his doctorate research. Welcome to the Technion!

A recent Haaretz post reported on Kira Radinsky and Galia Nordon's research on the relatedness between medicines for blood pressure and the Parkinson disease. A local copy is available here.

We are happy to announce that our PhD student Nofar Carmeli has won, together with Markus Kröll, the PODS 2019 Best Student Paper Award for the paper: On the Enumeration Complexity of Unions of Conjunctive Queries. Well done Nofar and Markus!

Liat Peterfreund has given her PhD seminar titled "The Complexity of Relational Queries over Extractions from Text". Congratulations Liat!

Nofar Carmeli has won the Google PhD Fellowships for 2019. These awards have been presented to exemplary PhD students in computer science and related disciplines to acknowledge their contributions to their areas of specialty and provide funding for their education and research. Congratulations Nofar and well done!

In addition to the three lab papers announced earlier, the following lab papers were also accepted to PODS 2019:

• Nofar Carmeli and Markus Kröll: On the Enumeration Complexity of Unions of Conjunctive Queries
• Dominik D. Freydenberger, Benny Kimelfeld, Markus Kröll and Liat Peterfreund: Complexity Bounds for Relational Algebra over Document Spanners
• Benny Kimelfeld, Phokion Kolaitis and Muhammad Tibi: Query Evaluation in Election Databases

Lot's of excitement in the lab!

Nofar Carmeli for winning the Jacobs Scholarship. Well done Nofar!

Congratulations to Elad Kravi who gave his PhD seminar this week! Elad's work, titled "Understanding the Context of Microactions on the Web", was advised by Prof. Beny Kimelfeld and Prof. Yaron Kanza.

A new server has joined the lab computing infrastructure. The server, called Gaon7, has 500GB of RAM, and 64 CPU threads of the new Intel Scalable architecture (Xeon Gold). Happy processing!

The German Research Foundation DFG (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft) has awarded a DIP grant to the project entitled "Quantitative Reasoning about Database Queries",  in collaboration with Prof. Martin Grohe.

Two lab papers were accepted to AAAI 2019:

• "Building causal graphs from medical literature and electronic medical records" by Galia Nordon, Kira Radinsky, Uri Shalit, Benny Kimelfeld, Gideon Koren, and Varda Shalev.
• "Approximate inference of outcomes in probabilistic elections" by Batya Kenig and Benny Kimelfeld.

Two lab papers were accepted to ICDT 2019:

• "A formal framework for probabilistic unclean databases" by Christopher De Sa, Ihab F. Ilyas, Benny Kimelfeld, Christopher Re, and Theodoros Rekatsinas.
• "Recursive programs for document spanners" by Liat Peterfreund, Balder ten Cate, Ronald Fagin, and Benny Kimelfeld.

Three lab papers were accepted to PODS 2019:

• "Split-Correctness in Information Extraction" by Johannes Doleschal, Benny Kimelfeld, Wim Martens, Yoav Nahshon and Frank Neven.
• "Ranked enumeration of minimal triangulations" by Noam Ravid, Dori Medini, and Benny Kimelfeld.
• "Regularizing Conjunctive Features for Classification" by Pablo Barceló, Alexander Baumgartner, Victor Dalmau and Benny Kimelfeld

PhD student Nofar Carmeli won the prestigious Aharon and Ephraim Katzir Study Grant. Congratulations Nofar!

Benny Kimelfeld and Nofar Carmeli attended the WEPA2018 workshop on Enumeration Problems & Applications.  This year, the workshop took place in Pisa, Italy.

The paper "Separating Wheat from Chaff: Joining Biomedical Knowledge and Patient Data for Repurposing Medications" by Galia Nordon, Gideon Koren, Varda Shalev, Eric Horvitz, and Kira Radinsky, was accepted to IAAI 2019.

On April'18 we had a lab trip at the Carmel mountains. We visited the "finger cave", then had a nice walk, and eventually enjoyed an authentic Druze meal.

The paper “Computing Optimal Repairs for Functional Dependencies” by Ester Livshits, Benny Kimelfeld, and Sudeepa Roy, was accepted to the 2018 PODS conference.

The paper “Probabilistic Inference Over Repeated Insertion Models”, by Batya Kenig, Lovro Ilijasić, Haoyue Ping, Benny Kimelfeld and Julia Stoyanovich, was accepted to the 2018 AAAI conference.

The paper “eLinda: Explorer for Linked Data” by Tal Yahav, Oren Kalinsky, Oren Mishali and Beny Kimelfeld, was accepted to the 2018 EDBT conference (demo track).

The paper “A Query Engine for Probabilistic Preferences” by Uzi Cohen, Batya Kenig, Haoyue Ping, Benny Kimelfeld, and Julia Stoyanovich, was accepted to the 2018 SIGMOD conference.