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

News!

5 Jan, 2008:

I have started blogging(?!) about interesting research articles I read, as well as my musings on research in Artificial Intelligence / Information Retrieval / Databases / etc. I will also post any presentations I give or papers I write. You can check it out here. Feel free to agree/disagree with me in the comments!

29 Nov, 2007:

I gave a quick talk today (along with Giovanni Toffetti and Monica Landoni) to the new PhD students at the University of Lugano on life during and after a PhD. - Finally my chance to tell the new students all the stuff I wish somebody had told me when I started! I'm posting my advice/musings online in case somebody else finds it useful.

22 Nov, 2007:

Today I gave a lecture on Web 2.0 to 3rd year undergraduate students in Informatics at the University of Lugano.
I concentrated on the themes of user-generated content (wikis, blogging, tagging), applications (mash-ups), social networks and personalization. For each area I gave an overview of current techniques and described some examples, before discussing some research areas (and providing pointers to further information).
The slides of the presentation are available online. - Being a presentation on Web 2.0 I thought that using an online office suite was appropriate....

11 Sep, 2007:

Craig Knoblock and I published an article "Learning Semantic Definitions of Online Information Sources" in the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research (JAIR). The article provides a more detailed description of our work on inducing service descriptions that we presented at IJCAI.

6 Aug, 2007:

I have just taken up a PostDoc position in the Informatics Faculty of the University of Lugano, Switzerland. I will be working with Fabio Crestani on the problem of discovering, modeling and providing personalized access to news feeds, blogs, and other online data sources. I am very excited about the work and see a great opportunity for combining Data Integration, Personalization and Distributed Information Retrieval techniques.

14 Feb, 2007:

The software I wrote for my thesis for learning definitions of web sources has just been made available on the ISI website! The package is royalty-free for research purposes and comes with all the source code. Documentation is "in progress", so feel free to contact me with installation questions.

9 Jan, 2007:

Here are the slides that I presented today at IJCAI-07.

About me

I am a PhD Graduate in Computer Science from the University of Trento, Italy.

Until recently, I was working/studying at the Information Sciences Institute of the University of Southern California in the Information Integration Research Group under the guidance of Craig Knoblock.

I have now moved to Switzerland and taken up a PostDoc position in the Informatics Faculty of the University of Lugano. I am working with Fabio Crestani on the problem of discovering, modeling and providing personalized access to news feeds, blogs, and other online data sources. To tackle the problem I plan to combine techniques from Data Integration, Personalization and Distributed Information Retrieval.

My research interests are varied and include the following areas:

Machine Learning^w & Web/Data Mining^w
Learning relational models for semi-structured data sources, (such as e-commerce websites, weather feeds, hotel search services, etc.)
Information Integration^w, Information Retrieval^w & Web Services^w
Query reformulation algorithms and schema matching/mapping techniques for integrating data from heterogeneous sources and automatically generating mash-ups^w.
Automated Planning^w & Search^w
Constraint Satisfaction (CSP)^w & Propositional Satisfiability (SAT)^w encodings of Web-agent reasoning, (e.g. Web Service orchestration).
Resource Optimisation for Computational Grids^w
Development of distributed marketplace algorithms for optimizing data access and availability on a DataGrid.

My research

Recently, I have been working on a system for learning semantic descriptions of online information sources. The aim of the work is to allow for the automated discovery and integration of new sources into existing integration systems (such as information mediators or simple mashups). The algorithm we developed induces conjunctive query definitions for information providing services (such as these RSS feeds from Yahoo) in terms of other possibly simpler information sources (such as these). A good overview of what our system can do is found in this paper:

Learning Semantic Descriptions of Web Information Sources
Mark James Carman and Craig A. Knoblock.
In Proceedings of the Twentieth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-07). Hyderabad, India, January 2007.

You can download the software we have developed from the ISI website. The software is royalty-free for research purposes and comes with all the source code. Documentation is limited, so feel free to contact me with installation questions.

A detailed descripton of how the system works can be found in this article:

Learning Semantic Definitions of Online Information Sources
Mark James Carman and Craig A. Knoblock.
Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research (JAIR), volume 30, pages 1-50, 2007.

You can also have a look at the slides I presented at my thesis defense, or watch the video of a seminar I gave at ISI last September. (Unfortunately the first 4 minutes of audio is missing, but the video shows the slides as well, so you shouldn't have any problems following the presentation.)

Publications

Here are some of my publications:

Learning Semantic Definitions of Online Information Sources
Mark James Carman and Craig A. Knoblock.
Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research (JAIR), volume 30, pages 1-50, 2007.

Beyond the Elves: Making Intelligent Agents Intelligent
Craig A. Knoblock, José Luis Ambite, Mark Carman, Matthew Michelson, Pedro Szekely and Rattapoom Tuchinda.
AI Magazine, 2007 (To Appear).

Learning Semantic Definitions of Information Sources on the Internet
Mark James Carman.
Doctorate Thesis, (Advisors: Paolo Traverso and Craig A. Knoblock),
Department of Information and Communication Technologies, University of Trento, August 2006.

Inducing Source Descriptions for Automated Web Service Composition
Mark James Carman and Craig A. Knoblock.
In Proceedings of the AAAI 2005 Workshop on Exploring Planning and Scheduling for Web Services, Grid, and Autonomic Computing, Technical Report WS-05-03. AAAI Press, 2005.

Web Service Composition as Planning
Mark Carman, Luciano Serafini and Paolo Traverso,
In Proceedings of the ICAPS'03 Workshop on Planning for Web Services, Trento, Italy, June 2003

Planning for Web Services
Mark James Carman.
In Proceedings of the ICAPS'03 Doctoral Consortium, Trento, Italy, June 2003.

Planning for Web Services the Hard Way
Mark Carman and Luciano Serafini,
SAINT'03 Workshop on Service Oriented Computing, Orlando, USA, January 2003, IEEE Computer Society Press

Towards an Economy-Based Optimisation of File Access and Replication on a Data Grid
Mark Carman, Floriano Zini, Luciano Serafini and Kurt Stockinger,
International Workshop on Agent based Cluster and Grid Computing at International Symposium on Cluster Computing and the Grid (CCGrid'2002), Berlin, Germany, May 2002, IEEE Computer Society Press

A Request Language for Web-Services based on Planning and Constraint Satisfaction
M. Aiello, M. Papazoglou, J. Yang, M. Carman, M. Pistore, L. Serafini and P. Traverso,
VLDB workshop on Technologies for E-Services (TES), 2002, Springer

Grid Query Optimisation in the Data Grid
Paolo Busetta, Mark Carman, Luciano Serafini, Kurt Stockinger and Floriano Zini,
Technical Report, TR-01 09-01, IRST, Trento, Italy, Sept. 2001

Software

EIDOS: Efficiently Inducing Definitions for Online Sources [Download Page]

EIDOS 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 download the software 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.

Other stuff

People

Over the last few years I've been lucky enough to work with a number of talented people including:

Marco Aiello, José Luis Ambite, Paolo Busetta, Yao-Yi Chiang, Dan Goldberg, Craig Knoblock, Kristina Lerman, Matt Michelson, Martin Michalowski, Mike Papazoglou, Luciano Serafini, Kurt Stockinger, Snehal Thakkar, Paolo Traverso, Rattapoom (Pipe) Tuchinda, Floriano Zini

Blogs

I have a research blog, which I post my papers, presentations and thoughts to occasionally.

Here are some personal blogs of different computer science researchers that I read:

Geeking with Greg, Alon Halevy, Paolo Massa, Marco Aiello, Fabrizio Silvestri, Paolo Avesani.

For research into social networks, web mining, etc.:

Data Mining: Text Mining, Visualization and Social Media, Yahoo! Research Berkeley.

If you are interested in mashups and geospatial data integration, I recommend:

Yahoo! Pipes, Ogle Earth, Google Earth Blog, Google Maps Mania, The Earth is Square, Google Sightseeing.

And to find out what's going on at the Information Sciences Institute of USC, check out the ai-grads blog.

A very brief Bio [Full CV]

I grew up in Adelaide, Australia.

I received an Australian Student's Prize upon graduating from high school in 1995.

In 1998, I spent six months studying in Stuttgart, Germany, where I met my wife, Daniela (who comes from Piacenza, Italy).

I received a Bachelor's Degree (with First Class Honours) in Electrical and Electronic Engineering and Arts from the University of Adelaide in 1999.

In 2000, I worked in the E-Commerce division of Telstra Research Labs in Sydney, Australia.

In 2001, I moved to Trento, Italy, and started working at the Center for Scientific and Technological Research (IRST) in the Automated Reasoning Systems Division.

In January 2005, I moved to Los Angeles, California to work at the Information Sciences Institute of the University of Southern California.

In July 2006, I received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Trento, Italy.

In August 2007, I moved to Switzerland to take up a PostDoc position in the Informatics Faculty of the University of Lugano.