Praveen Seshadri

Assistant Professor
praveen@cs.cornell.edu http://www.cs.cornell.edu/home/praveen/praveen.html
Ph.D. University of Wisconsin, Madison, 1996

I am interested in investigating new directions in database system and query processing architectures. I have been on leave since June 1999. However, my research interests are broadly reflected in the following projects of the Cornell Database Systems group (http://www.cs.cornell.edu/database). The Cornell Predator project

(http://www.cs.cornell.edu/database/predator) is building a full-fledged public-domain database system. The system explores innovative techniques for building extensible query processing systems. An example of extensibility is the use of Enhanced Abstract Data Types (E-ADTs) to efficiently extend the type system of the database. Predator acts as a test-bed and research vehicle for most of the other Cornell database research projects. It is funded by NSF and Microsoft.

The Cornell Jaguar project (http://www.cs.cornell.edu/database/jaguar) extends Predator with mobile query processing. The motivation is to eliminate traditional client-server barriers that are obstacles to high-performance query processing. There are two aspects to Jaguar: migrating client functionality to the database server, and vice versa. We use Java to specify portable representations of query components. Recently, we have extended this work to run queries over active storage systems. This project is funded by the NSF, RAFL, and IBM.

The COUGAR project (http://www.cs.cornell.edu/database/cougar) is the Cornell University Gadget Archive. The goal is to treat a sensor network like a large highly distributed database system, and run decision support queries through the sensor network. The research results from this project can also be applied to “databases” composed of large networks of small devices, be they sensors or actuators. This project is funded by DARPA.

Professional Activities

Tutorials Chair: IEEE Data Engineering Conference, San Diego, CA, March 2000.

Panel Member: IEEE Mobicom Workshop on Mobile Database Systems, Seattle, WA, August 1999.

Publications

“Device Database Systems.” IEEE Data Engineering Conference (March 2000) (with P. Bonnet and J. Gehrke).

“An Algebraic Compression Framework for Database Query Processing.” IEEE Data Engineering Conference (March 2000) (with Z. Chen).