Selected recent talks and publications

Workflow provenance

Invited myGrid overview and provenance talk at the semi-annual ESIP meeting , July 7-10, 2009, Santa Barbara, CA [PDF]
Janus: Fine-grained and efficient provenance querying for Taverna, IMG group seminar, June 3, 2009, Manchester [PDF]
Granular workflow provenance in Taverna, presented at the Symposium on Workflow Provenance, Salt Lake City, Oct 2008 [PDF]
Data lineage model for Taverna workflows with lightweight annotation requirements, Presented at IPAW'08, Salt Lake City, USA [PDF]

Adaptive Query Processing and Data Quality

(EDBT'09 paper:) Time-completeness trade-offs in record linkage using Adaptive Query Processing.
[Presentation slides, 3/09]
Oct. 2008: Research seminar slides, Cardiff University [PDF]

PhD work

Keynote given at the PhD Symposium, School of Computer Science, Manchester, Nov 4, 2008 [PDF]
PhD dissertation: Modelling and Computing Information Quality in e-science: [PDF (1.8MB)]
(Best Dissertation Award from the School of Computer Science, UoM)

Qurator

Incorporating Domain-Specific Information Quality Constraints into Database Queries (the QXquery paper), ACM JDIQ, special issue, 2009 (??) [PDF]
Most recent Qurator talk (Roma, 2007)
[Abstract] [Full Presentation]
VLDB 2006 Quality Views paper
[Full text] [Bibtex entry]

DILS '07 paper on the SNPit project
[Full text] [Bibtex entry]

Paolo Missier, Ph.D.

I haul from a place near Venice, Italy, best known for hosting a large chemical plant and for being, well, just next to Venice.

I am currently a Research Fellow, School of Computer Science, University of Manchester, UK. My general area is Information Management, but see below for specific research interests.

I started my professional meandering as a Research Scientist at Telcordia Technologies (formerly Bellcore) Applied Research, NJ, USA where I stayed for nearly eight years (1994-2001), working on a variety of projects for data management in telecommunication services.
The more recent projects in that part of life have been focused on open architectures for the rapid deployment of telecommunication services in the convergent networks (see R. Jain, F. Anjum, P. Missier and S. Shastry, "Java Call Control, Coordination and Transactions", IEEE Communications, Jan. 2000, also US Patent 6,967,957).

Following a serious lapse of reason, I then returned to Europe in 2001 (in time to watch the 9/11 events, which unfolded only a few miles from my previous home, on a TV screen at the VLDB conference in Rome) and until 2004 I was an independent IT consultant in Italy, with engagements in the public sector (SW architectures for the Italian e-government, data quality issues), worked as an indendent researcher on EU and Italian-funded projects, and was a lecturer on databases at University of Milano Bicocca.

When reality leaves me alone I retreat into the wonderful world of photography, where my mind still has a chance to find short spells of balance and calm. But that is increasingly rare.
A very incomplete archive of past personal visual achievements can be found here. Serious shutterbugs are advised to head here instead, unless you don't like digital and are into photography as a social medium, in which case I would recommend e-visiting Magnus photographer and personal hero, Sebastiao Salgado, as well as the Magnum site itself.

List of publications (on Mendeley)

News:

November, 2009: My PhD dissertation, now nearly two years old, was chosen for the ICIQ 2009 Ballou Pazer Best Dissertation Award. This award is associated with the annual International Conference on Information Quality, organized by the MIT Sloan School of Management and held In November, 2009 in Potsdam (home of the Hasso-Plattner Institute) and chaired by Prof. Felix Naumann.
July, 2009: Check out the DILS conference on Data Integration in the Life Sciences -- it was a great success!
22 Sept. 2008: For some reason, my PhD thesis was shortlisted by the British Computer Society for its annual Distinguished Dissertation competition, after winning the Best Dissertation Award from the School of Computer Science [Read the details here].

Main research interests

Process automation and workflow technology, and its implications to data and metadata management. Data and Information Quality, applications of Semantic Web technologies; distributed SW architectures, SOA and Grid computing.

Current main project (publication refs to be added):

Data and process provenance models for data lineage reconstruction in workflow systems. This is part of the myGrid middleware infrastructure for e-science. Please see left bar for recent presentations.
ADQP: Exploring the use of adaptive query processing techniques for record linkage. See sidebar on the left.

Recently completed projects:

Qurator -- Describing the quality of curated e-Science information resources. This has been my primary project between 2004-2007.
The main issue addressed in the project is how to let e-scientists characterize the quality of the information they need, in an intuitive, cost-effective and machine-processable way. Our approach combines semantic web technologies with service-oriented architectures to produce a framework in which reusability of components is emphasized.
The framework simplifies the creation and testing of data acceptability criteria for users by integrating with data processing environments, eg the Taverna workflow management system.
Ontogrid -- Architecture and services for the Semantic Grid -- please visit the site for more information.

Education

2008: Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Manchester, UK, on: Modelling and Computing Information Quality in e-science [PDF (1.8MB)]
(Best Dissertation Award from the School of Computer Science, UoM)

1993: M.Sc. in Computer Science from the University of Houston, Tx., working with Prof. Marek Rusinkiewicz on a language for multidatabase queries with some limited schema reconciliation features.

1991-1992: Civil servant, School of Medicine, University of Udine, working on data management and statistics for experimental protocols in hematology.

1990: B.Sc. and M.Sc. in Computer Science from Universita' di Udine, Italy
( with a thesis on semantic unification for logic programming)

Academic activities

PC co-chair, SWPM-2009 (First International Workshop on the role of Semantic Web in Provenance Management)

General Chair, DILS 2009

PC co-chair for the First International workshop on semantic metadata management (SeMMA08), co-located with ESWC'08.

PC chair for the Quality in Databases (QDB'08) workshop, co-located with VLDB'08.

PC member for IQIS'06, WISE '07, CIKM '08, CIKM '09, DataX'07/'08, ICIQ '09 (here is the ICIQ'08 site), KSIM '09

Served as external reviewer for several conferences and workshops, including SIGMOD, VLDB, IQIS 2006 (a SIGMOD workshop), ICIQ (2005, 2006), ISWC 2006, WWW08, DataX'08, as well as journals, including IEEE TKDE, Journal of Web Semantics (JWS), Decision Support Systems, ACM Journal of Data and Information Quality (JDIQ)

Lecturing

2008-2009:
Invited lectures (Data Migration and Data Quality) at the School of Computer Science, Manchester, Course on Software Evolution. Host Dr. Embury

2008
- Invited lecture (Data integration in the Life Sciences) at the Hasso Plattner Institute, Potdsam, Germany. Host prof. F. Naumann.

2006, 2007, 2008, 2009: Design and tutoring on an online database course for M.Sc. students at the School of Computer Science, University of Manchester.

2002-2003, adjunct lecturer on databases (introduction to databases, DBMS architectures) at Universita' Milano Bicocca, Milano, Italy.
M.Sc. students final project supervisor on the topic of data quality management using data warehousing.

2000, Special M.Sc. course on e-commerce technologies at Rutgers University, NJ, USA

I also taught a number of private staff training cources on SW architecture modelling and design with UML

See a more complete list of activities here