News & Events

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.