Mum 2004

We consider the problem of accessing multiple heterogeneous information sources (e.g. web sources , relational DBMSs , flat files, etc.) and constructing a succinct story about an entity (e.g. a person or a place or an event) in a way that meets the user's interests, and deliver the resulting story to the user across heterogeneous, potentially mobile devices. As such, a story must be short (its length is determined by the user), and it must include facts whose value may vary from one user to another. We have developed a suite of algorithms to do this, and we are conducting experiments on the quality of the stories as well as the computation time involved. We have developed a prototype implementation of the STORY system to create and deliver stories about Pompeii where user's could have multiple hardware devices on which the story is delivered currently, we can deliver stories in two languages to laptops and PDAs such as the PocketPC. (Joint work with M. Albanese, C. Cesarano, M. Fayzullin and A. Picariello). Biography: V.S. SUBRAHMANIAN is Professor of Computer Science and Interim Director of the University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies. He received the NSF Young Investigator Award in 1993 and the Distinguished Young Scientist Award from the MD Academy of Science in 1997. He is known for his work on integrating heterogeneous information sources, for developing the foundations of multimedia database systems, for work on probabilistic reasoning, and for building cooperative agent systems on top of legacy databases and codebases. He has edited two books, one on nonmonotonic reasoning (MIT Press) and one on multimedia databases (Springer). He has co-authored an advanced database textbook (Morgan Kaufman, 1997), a multimedia database textbook, and a monograph on heterogeneous software agents.