Speaker: Avigdor Gal, Technion.

  Title: On the Stable Marriage of Maximum Weight Royal Couples: The
  Health problems of Data Integration

  Abstract: Data integration is the process of combining data
  residing at different data sources to generate a unified data view
  of these data. Schema matching generates correspondences between
  concepts describing the meaning of data in various heterogeneous,
  distributed data sources. Therefore, schema matching is recognized
  to be one of the basic operations required by the process of data
  integration and thus has a great impact on its outcome and on
  numerous modern applications. In this talk we shall discuss the
  poor health of data integration and trace it back to inherent
  uncertainty in the schema matching process. We shall then present
  two specific research problems. First, we shall compare the use of
  two matching algorithms, namely Maximum Weight Bipartite Graphs
  and Stable Marriage, analyze their usage in schema matching and
  suggest several heuristics that build on these algorithms. Then,
  we shall propose a new view on the behavior of schema matching
  heuristics and show the use of this view in improving matching
  quality.

  Bio: Avigdor Gal is an Associate professor at the Technion --
  Israel Institute of Technology. He received his D.Sc. degree from
  the Technion in 1995 in the area of temporal active databases. He
  has published more than 70 papers in journals (e.g. Journal of the
  ACM (JACM), ACM Transactions on Database Systems (TODS), IEEE
  Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering (TKDE), ACM
  Transactions on Internet Technology (TOIT), and the VLDB Journal),
  books (Temporal Databases: Research and Practice) and conferences
  on the topics of data integration, temporal databases, information
  systems architectures, and active databases. Avigdor is a steering
  committee member of IFCIS, a member of IFIP WG 2.6, and a
  recipient of the IBM Faculty Award for 2002-2004. He is a member
  of the ACM and a senior member of IEEE.