Faculty Member

Richard Snodgrass (email: rts@cs.arizona.edu)

Doctoral Students

Cheng Yi
Rui Zhang  (Chief programmer)  (email: ruizhang@email.arizona.edu)

Previous Graduate Students

Preetha Chatterje
Pallavi Chilappagari
Siou Lin
Lopamudra Sarangi
Linh Tran
Man Zhang

Undergraduate Students

Jordan Martin
Adam Robertson

Description

Computer science has long been considered to emphasize three different perspectives: mathematics, science, and engineering. Mathematics appears in computer science through mathematical formalism, mathematical theories, and algorithms, which are ultimately mathematical objects that can be then expressed as programs, and vice versa. Engineering, which is concerned with making things better, faster, smaller, and cheaper, is prevalent in computer science. Science may be defined as developing general, predictive theories that describe and explain observed phenomena, and evaluating these theories, say via hypothesis testing. While the database field has some very strong mathematical and engineering work, the scientific perspective has been much less prominent.

This project takes a scientifically rigorous approach to an area previously dominated by the engineering perspective, that of database query optimization. Our goal is to understand cost-based query optimizers as a general class of computational artifacts, to come up with insights and ultimately with predictive theories about how such optimizers, again, as a general class, behave.

people_sodb.jpg Active members (left to right): Pallavi Chilappagari, Siou Lin, Rick Snodgrass, Rui Zhang, Preetha Chatterjee, and Lopamudra Sarangi (not pictured: Linh Tran and Man Zhang)

Publications

Richard T. Snodgrass, "Towards a Science of Temporal Databases," Keynote Address, Proceedings of the International Symposium on Temporal Representation and Reasoning, Alicante, Spain, V. Goranko and X. Sean Wang (ed), pages 6-7, June 2007. (pdf)

Funding

National Science Foundation, CISE
Information and Intelligent Systems Division
Towards a Science of Database Systems
September 2006 to August 2008 (PI: Richard T. Snodgrass) IIS-0639106


Software

Arizona DB Laboratory



Course

Seminar in the "Science" of Computer Science, Spring 2007.

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