Mark James Carman

email:
phone: +41 58 666 4310

location:
University of Lugano
(Università della Svizzera italiana)

Faculty of Informatics
Via Giuseppe Buffi, 13
CH-6904 Lugano, Switzerland

About me

I am a postdoc researcher in the Information Retrieval group within the Informatics Faculty at the University of Lugano, Switzerland.

I work primarily on the problem of discovering, modeling and personalizing access to news feeds, blogs, and Hidden Web databases. To tackle this problem I combine ideas from machine learning, distributed information retrieval and data integration. In particular I make use of supervised and semi-supervised learning techniques, as well as language modeling and topic modeling techniques.

In general, my research interests are quite varied and include:

• Information Retrieval and Web Mining
  Opinion detection, topic modeling, distributed IR and personalization with particular emphasis on applications in blog search, tag data and social network analysis.
• Data Integration and Machine Learning
  Learning relational models for semi-structured data sources (such as e-commerce websites, weather feeds, etc.). Query reformulation algorithms and schema matching for integrating data from heterogeneous sources to automatically generate mash-ups.
• Automated Planning and Grid Computing
  Constraint satisfaction (CSP and SAT) encodings of Web-agent reasoning for Web Service orchestration. Marketplace algorithms for optimizing data access and availability on data grids.

Prior to moving to Lugano, I studied in the Information Integration Group at the Information Sciences Institute of USC and also at the Fondazione Bruno Kessler (formerly IRST). My PhD thesis is from the University of Trento. For my thesis, I developed a system for learning semantic descriptions of online information sources. The aim of the work was to allow for the automated discovery and integration of new sources into existing integration systems (such as information mediators or simple mashups).

News!

Publications

Below are some selected publications of mine. If you can't find the paper you're after please send me a . Here is a bibtex file with most of my publications. Some of my more recent papers can also be found on the IR group website.

Software

EIDOS (Efficiently Inducing Definitions for Online Sources) is a system for learning semantic descriptions of online information sources (such as these RSS feeds). The descriptions are used to automatically integrate the sources into (mediator based) information integration systems. A complete description of the purpose and functionality of the system can be found in my thesis. You can also have a look at the slides I presented at my defense. The software can be downloaded from the ISI website. It is royalty-free for research purposes and comes with all the source code. Here is the latest documentation. Feel free to contact me with installation questions.

Blogs

I have a research blog, which I post my papers, presentations and thoughts to occasionally. Otherwise, I recommend the blogs of a number of other computer science researchers: Greg Linden, Matthew Hurst, Paolo Massa, Jonathan Elsas, Alon Halevy, William Cohen, Panos Ipeirotis.

A very brief Bio