CS Forum: Nan Zhang

Exploration, Analytics and Privacy of Web Databases

Speaker: prof. Nan Zhang
Speaker affiliation: The George Washington University
Host: prof. Aristides Gionis
Time: 11:15 (coffee at 11:00)
Venue: T2 in CS building

Exploration, Analytics and Privacy of Web Databases

Abstract

Numerous online databases are hidden behind restrictivesearch or browsing web interfaces. Examples include e-commerce websites, government repositories, search engines, as well as social networks. We consider third-party data analytics over these hidden databases – specifically, how to break through the barrier set forth by the restrictive web interfaces to truly gauge the value of the deep web. In this talk, I will cover a number of recent developments on the exploration and mining of hidden web databases, ranging from crawling and sampling data tuples to discovering hidden information such as secret ranks. I will also discuss the privacy and security concerns caused by these recent developments and the corresponding countermeasures.

Bio

Dr. Nan Zhang is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at the George Washington University, Washington, DC. He is currently on leave at the National Science Foundation, serving as a Program Director in the Information and Intelligent Systems Division. He received the B.S. degree from Peking University in 2001 and the Ph.D. degree from Texas A&M University in 2006, both in computer science. His current research interests include databases and information security/privacy.  He received the NSF CAREER award in 2008.