Johannes Gehrke

My research lies in the design and implementation of scalable systems. Recent areas of interest are database systems, data mining, infrastructure for Web 2.0, and scalability of computer games and virtual worlds. In the Hilda Project we are developing new models for building three-tier data-driven Web applications, focusing on ease of programming, extensibility, and personalization. In the Cayuga Project we are building a scalable system for complex event processing. I also work on data privacy, and we have developed several methods for privacy-preserving data mining and data publishing. I also have recently started research on scalability in computer games, and I am interested in applications of database and data mining technology to the sciences.

Until July 2008, I am on sabbatical in Heidelberg, Germany, working as Chief Scientist for Fast Search and Transfer and visiting the University of Heidelberg.

For more on my research, go to the homepage of the Cornell Database Group.

Recent Publications 

• David Martin, Johannes Gehrke, and Joseph Halpern. Toward Expressive and Scalable Sponsored Search Auctions. ICDE 2008. Cancun, Mexico, April 2008.
• Ashwin Machanavajjhala, Daniel Kifer, John Abowd, Johannes Gehrke, and Lars Vilhuber. Privacy: From Theory to Practice on the Map. ICDE 2008. Cancun, Mexico, April 2008.
• Walker White, Christoph Koch, Nitin Gupta, Johannes Gehrke, and Alan Demers. Database Research Opportunities in Computer Games. SIGMOD Record, September 2007.
• Nitin Gupta, Fan Yang, Alan Demers, Johannes Gehrke, and Jayavel Shanmugasundaram. User-Centric Personalized Extensibility for Data-Driven Web Applications (System Demo). SIGMOD 2007.
• Lars Brenna, Alan Demers, Johannes Gehrke, Mingsheng Hong, Joel Ossher, Biswanath Panda, Mirek Riedewald, Mohit Thatte, and Walker White. Cayuga: A High-Performance Event Processing Engine(System Demo). SIGMOD 2007.
• Mingsheng Hong, Alan Demers, Johannes Gehrke, Mirek Riedewald, and Walker White. Massively Multi-Query Join Processing in Publish/Subscribe Systems. SIGMOD 2007.
• Adina Crainiceanu, Prakash Linga, Ashwin Machanavajjhala, Johannes Gehrke, Jayavel Shanmugasundaram. P-Ring: An Efficient and Robust P2P Range Index Structure. SIGMOD 2007.
• Walker White, Alan Demers, Christoph Koch, Johannes Gehrke, and Rajmohan Rajagopalan. Scaling Games to Epic Proportions. In SIGMOD 2007.
• Walker White, Mirek Riedewald, Johannes Gehrke and Alan Demers. What's "Next"? In PODS 2007.

Full list of my publications (from DBLP). Citation index (ResearchIndex).

Awards   

• New York State Foundation for Science, Technology, and Innovation. Faculty Development Grant, 2007. (Press release.)
• Cornell University Provost’s Award for Distinguished Scholarship, 2004. (Cornell Chronicle article.)
• Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, 2003. (Cornell Chronicle article.)
• National Science Foundation CAREER Award, 2002. (Cornell Chronicle article.)
• Cornell College of Engineering James and Mary Tien Excellence in Teaching Award, 2001.
• IBM Faculty Development Award 2000 and 2001.

Selected Professional Activities

• Member of the ACM SIGKDD Curriculum Committee.
• Adjunct Associate Professor, University of Tromsø, Norway.

Program Committees

• 33rd International Conference on Very Large Data Bases (VLDB 2007). Vienna, Austria, September 2007. Program Chair.
• Tenth ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD 2004). Seattle, WA, August 2004. Program Co-chair (with Bill DuMouchel).

Editorial Activities:

• Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery. Action Editor.
• Machine Learning Journal. Member of the Editorial Board.
• Journal of Privacy Technology. Member of the Editorial Board.
• ACM Transactions on Knowledge Discovery from Data (TKDD). Member of the Editorial Board.
• Foundations and Trends in Databases. Editor.
• The VLDB Journal. Member of the Editorial Board.

People

• PhD Students
  • Graduating Summer 2008: Mingsheng Hong (→Vertica), Ashwin Machanavajjhala, David Martin (co-advised with Joe Halpern, →Google), Fan Yang (co-advised with Jayavel Shanmugasundaram).
  • Current: Nitin Gupta, Biswanath Panda, Ben Sowell.
• Postdoc: Felix Weigel.
• Research Programmer: Manuel Calimlim.
• Alumni:
  • Philippe Bonnet (Research Associate, 1999-2001). First employment: Associate Professor, Department of Computer Science, University of Copenhagen.
  • Zhiyuan Chen (Ph.D., August 2002; co-advised with Praveen Seshadri). First employment: Microsoft Research.
  • Adina Crăiniceanu (Ph.D., December 2005). First employment: Assistant Professor, United States Naval Academy.
  • Abhinandan Das (Ph.D., August 2005). First employment: Google.
  • Alin Dobra (Ph.D., July 2003). First employment: Assistant Professor, Department of Computer and Information Science and Engineering, University of Florida.
  • Alexandre Evfimievski (Ph.D., August 2004). First employment: IBM Almaden Research Center.
  • Dan Kifer (Ph.D., August 2006 and postdoc September 2006 to August 2007). First employments: Yahoo! Research, Assistant Professor, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Penn State University.
  • Prakash Linga (Ph.D., June 2007, co-advised with Jayavel Shanmugasundaram). First employment: Moka5.
  • Tobias Mayr (Ph.D., August 2001; co-advised with Praveen Seshadri). First employment: IBM Almaden Research Center.
  • Niki Trigoni (postdoc, November 2002 to July 2004). First employment: Lecturer, School of Computer Science and Information Systems, Birkbeck, University of London. 
  • Yong Yao (Ph.D., January 2007). First employment: IBM Silicon Valley Lab.

Acknowledgments

My research is partially supported by the National Science Foundation under Grants IIS-0121175, IIS-0621438, and CNS-0627680. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the sponsors.

Last modified on April 9, 2008.