Rachel Pottinger
I'm an Assistant Professor in the Computer Science Department at the
University of British Columbia (in Vancouver) where I am affilated
with the Data
Management and Mining
group. I finished my PhD
in the database group in
the Computer Science and Engineering Department at
the University of
Washington.
Research
My research centers on (1) how data can be managed in situations where
there are multiple databases and (2) how to manage data that is
currently not well supported by databases. To that end, my students
and I are currently exploring a number of topics, including:
- Helping to answer aggregate queries over disparate sources that
must be quickly coordinated. This problem is motivated by disaster
management and is work with Jian Xu.
- Coordinating data and updates from sources that are related but
have very little exact overlap. For example, in building a building,
an architect will create a design, and then an estimator will estimate
the costs. If the design changes, the estimate must be redone,
largely from scratch, including determining where changes have
occurred in the design. This is joint work with Michael Lawrence and Sheryl
Staub-French.
-
Most data warehouses are built bottom up - at design time, a data
warehouse schema is constructed on the basis of all local schemas of
the data sources to be integrated. At run time, the warehousing
process starts with the identification of sources. The goal of this
project is to study requirements-driven (top-down) data warehousing
construction that uses large, realistic, data collections and
associated user scenarios and case studies. This is joint work with
Dibesh Shakya
at UBC and
Iluju Kiringa,
Kwok Wong, and Fatemeh Nargesian at the University of Ottawa.
- Making sense of data that is stored either in large document
repositories or on social networks is difficult. For example, given a
repository of meeting minutes that are organized by date, how can you
find all the documents that are related to the heating system? This
is joint work with Laks
Lakshmanan and
Ali Moosavi.
Information about some of these topics can be found by looking at my
publications.
Students
One of the great things about this job is that I get to work with a
great group of students (see the list below). If you're interested
in becoming a prospective graduate student in my group, please start
with the information here.
Current Graduate Students
Current Undergraduate Students
- Piam Kiarostami
- Jamila Salari
Graduate Alumni and first positions post graduation
Teaching
On the personal side of life, I'm married to Steve Wolfman, the mother of
Naomi and enjoy the attentions of
our cat NMI. You can also find a bit about my personal history, or see my CV.
Rachel Pottinger
E-mail Address: ![rap [at] cs [dot] ubc [dot] ca](/~rap/address.jpg)
Office Location: ICICS/CS 345
Phone: (604)822-0436
Fax:(604)822-5485
Postal/Courier address:
The Department of Computer Science
University of British Columbia
201-2366 Main Mall
Vancouver, B.C. V6T 1Z4
Canada
