d.i.r.    Database and Information Research
Faculty of Science, UOIT

Research Projects
dir UOIT

Keyword search has been a tremedous success in the Web community. We are interested at building a search engine that supports Google-like keyword search queries for legacy relational databases. The challenge of performing keyword search over relational data is that the search results need to be assembled from multiple tables and tuples. Thus, one must overcome the exponentially large search space. We have developed some interesting algorithms that work well for a family of data warehousing scenarios. Help is still needed to come up with more robust search algorithms.

Frisk was showcased at ICDE'09, Shanghai, China

A decade ago, the idea of watching streamed video over the Web from a mobile device while riding the bus to work is as far fetched as Time Travel. Yet, it's a standard thing people do using their smart phones coupled with wireless data plan. This has been made possible by recent advances in Computer networks (3G), distributed storage (Youtube) and mobile computing (smart phones). My research is to build on top of the existing networking, computing and storage infrastructure to enable extremely easy to deploy video capture, video retrieval via a declarative vision-based and search-based query language.

The following is an example of the biological video capture done in collaboration with Dr. Qureshi and Dr. Bonetta. The Youtube video can be accessed directly.

Radio frequency identification (RFID) is a promising technology for pervasively storing data into everyday articles such as clothing, bag, or even inside the human body. We are experimenting with utilizing the signal strength variation of RFID receivers to statistically infer the maximal likely position of RFID tags. This will enable an array of RFID receivers to collaboratively track the spatial position of moving tags.
I am looking for a self-motivated student to apply statistical inference to the sensor data to obtain spatial information of moving tags..

A youtube video here .

We are studying the information management and data analysis aspects of sensor networks. Our research lab is equipped with a wide variety of wireless sensor technology, ranging from wireless environmental sensors, power sensors, radio frequency identification (RFID) readers, and remote controlled actuators. Students have been developing software tools ranging from:

• Low-level hardware programming for data collection
• Network level transport and multicasting of data streams
• Graphical visualization of sensor data

Interested at Graduate School?

Interested at participating in a project, or starting a research project yourself? If the answer is yes, then consider graduate school at UOIT. You can contact me at for possible positions and details.

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