The Department of Computer Science welcomes Philip S. Yu, who will present a talk on big data on Wednesday, March 6 from 12:45–1:45 pm in Stuart Building, Room 111.

The problem of big data has become increasingly important in recent years. On the one hand, big data is an asset that potentially can offer tremendous value or reward to the data owner. On the other hand, it poses tremendous challenges to realize the value out of the big data. The very nature of the big data poses challenges not only because of its volume and velocity of being generated but also because of its variety and veracity. Here, variety means the data collected from various sources can have different formats from structured data to text to network/graph data to image, etc. Veracity concerns the trustworthiness of the data as the various data sources can have different reliability. In this talk, we will discuss these issues and approaches to address them.

Philip S. Yu is currently a professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Chicago and also holds the Wexler Chair in Information Technology. He spent most of his career at IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center and was manager of the Software Tools and Techniques Group. His research interests include big data, data mining, privacy preserving data publishing, data stream, social networking and database systems. Yu has published more than 720 papers in refereed journals and conferences with an h-index of 100. He holds or has applied for more than 300 United States patents.

Yu is a fellow of the ACM and the IEEE. He is the editor-in-chief of ACM Transactions on Knowledge Discovery from Data (and also was from 2001–04). He is on the steering committee of the IEEE Conference on Data Mining and ACM Conference on Information and Knowledge Management, and was a member of the IEEE Data Engineering steering committee. He had also served as an associate editor of ACM Transactions on Internet Technology and Transactions on Information Systems. He has received several IBM honors, including two IBM Outstanding Innovation Awards, an Outstanding Technical Achievement Award, two Research Division Awards and the 94th Plateau of Invention Achievement Awards. He was an IBM Master Inventor. Yu received a Research Contributions Award from the IEEE International Conference on Data Mining in 2003 and also an IEEE Region 1 Award for “promoting and perpetuating numerous new electrical engineering concepts” in 1999.

Yu received a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from National Taiwan University, M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from Stanford University, and an M.B.A. from New York University.