Westford Professor Wins Grants for Computer Research

The following is a press release from UMass Lowell

The National Science Foundation has awarded a UMass Lowell professor its most prestigious honor and grants totaling nearly $773,000 to fund two separate research projects designed to ensure computer users come up with the most accurate and helpful answers when seeking information from database search engines.

The projects are led by Prof. Tingjian Ge, who received the NSF Career Award – the foundation’s most prestigious honor – for his exemplary work as a young faculty member who is conducting outstanding research and integrating it into teaching methods. Ge’s students are participating in his work. 

Both projects look to improve the reliability of database-query results involving “uncertain data.” Computer scientists define the data as information that may be incomplete, inexact or highly variant due to flaws that may arise during its collection.

Ge, of Westford, will use the career grant – $474,110 awarded over five years – to fund his Managing Uncertain Scientific Experimental Data (MUSE) project. The research looks to solve query-processing challenges in databases containing large amounts of scientific data created during replicated experiments and accumulated within or across different institutions and research groups.

“Little has been done to query this data repository in an integrated and automatic manner, mainly because the results among different replicates of an experiment often show a large degree of inconsistency,” he said.

Ge’s second NSF grant for $298,751 will help fund his Querying Rich Uncertain Data in Real Time project, also known as RURAL. The research is aimed at managing data generated by such devices as smartphones, global-positioning system units, medical monitoring equipment, highway traffic sensors and computer and phone networks. These types of devices generate large amounts of raw, uncertain data, according to Ge.

“Effectively querying, analyzing and monitoring such data quickly in real time is a critical and challenging problem,” he said. Real-time decisions based on uncertain data may have unintended consequences in any number of ways. One common example is when drivers follow GPS directions only to arrive at an incorrect street address provided by the device.

“Other examples include decision-making in the detection and salvage of natural disasters with the assistance of sensors” that may provide inaccurate information, Ge said. “The goal of our RURAL project is to provide precise and informative answers to users’ queries within a given deadline.”

Ge’s students are gaining real-world research experience through his work.

“In both projects, my students and I blend concepts and techniques from the areas of databases, probability and information theory, statistics, machine learning and artificial intelligence,” he said.

Ge joined UMass Lowell’s computer science faculty in January. Other computer science faculty whose work has been recognized with an NSF Career Award include professors Benyuan Liu, Fred Martin, Jie Wang and Holly Yanco.