Areas of Research

Databases and Digital Libraries: distributed search over text databases; web search; "top-k" query processing; information extraction; text mining.

• Publications and Patents (from DBLP)
• CV
• Columbia's Database Research Group

Some Past and Current Research Projects

• SQOUT, a system for structured querying of text databases, via information extraction (ICDE '09 paper, SIGMOD Record '08 paper, ICDE '08 paper, TODS '07 paper, SIGMOD '06 paper)
• QProber, a system for automatically classifying and searching "hidden-web" text databases (TOIS '08 paper, TODS '07 paper, ICDE '05 paper, SIGMOD '04 paper, TOIS '03 paper, VLDB '02 paper, March '02 IEEE Data Engineering Bulletin paper)
• RANK: Top-k query processing (over relational databases: TODS '02 paper; over web-accessible databases: TODS '04 paper; over multimedia databases: TKDE '04 paper)
• Snowball and QXtract, building blocks for efficient information extraction (ICDE '03 paper [errata], WebDB '03 paper, DL '00 paper)
• SDARTS, a protocol and toolkit for metasearching (JCDL '02 paper, JCDL '01 paper)
• GeoSearch, a geographically-aware search engine (CIKM '03 paper, VLDB '00 paper)

Ph.D. Students

• Eugene Agichtein (graduated 5/2005; first employment: Postdoc Researcher, Microsoft Research; current employment: Assistant Professor, Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, Emory University)
• Hila Becker
• Nicolás Bruno (graduated 5/2003; current employment: Researcher, Microsoft Research)
• Wisam Dakka (graduated 11/2008; current employment: Software Engineer, Search Quality, Google)
• Panagiotis Ipeirotis (graduated 9/2004; current employment: Assistant Professor, Stern School of Business, New York University)
• Alpa Jain (graduated 9/2008; current employment: Scientist, Yahoo! Labs)
• Amélie Marian (graduated 9/2005; current employment: Assistant Professor, Department of Computer Science, Rutgers University)

Some Recent Professional Activities

• ACM Transactions on Database Systems: associate editor
   
• ACM Transactions on Information Systems: associate editor (1997-2005)
• IEEE Data Engineering Bulletin: associate editor (2000-2002)
  • Editor, Special Issue on "Text and Databases," December 2001
  • Editor, Special Issue on "Next-Generation Web Search," September 2000
     
• ICDE 2008: program committee vice-chair, for “Web Search and Deep Web” sub-area
• VLDB 2008: program committee member
   
• SIGMOD 2009: program committee member
• WWW 2009, Search Track: program committee member
• ICDE 2010: Seminars/tutorials co-chair

Teaching and Advising: Office Hours for Fall 2008

• cs4111-Introduction to Databases: Tuesdays, 4-5pm; Wednesdays, 10-11am
• General Studies and Postbaccalaureate Studies Program students with last name in A-L range (Prof. Mihalis Yannakakis advises the rest): Tuesdays, 5-6 pm (GS CS-Major Requirements)

I hold all of my office hours in Schapiro CEPSR 706. If the door downstairs is locked, please call me at 1-212-939-7064.

Biographical Sketch

Luis Gravano has been on the faculty of the Computer Science Department, Columbia University, since September 1997, where he has been an associate professor since July 2002. From January through August 2001, Luis was a Senior Research Scientist at Google (on leave from Columbia University). He received his Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from Stanford University in 1997. He also received an M.S. degree from Stanford University in 1994 and a B.S. degree from the Escuela Superior Latinoamericana de Informática (ESLAI), Argentina, in 1991. Luis is an associate editor of the ACM Transactions on Database Systems and a recipient of a CAREER award from the National Science Foundation.

Other Resources

• Spring '08 North East DB/IR Day, held on April 18, 2008, at Columbia University
• STARTS protocol for Internet retrieval and search

• DBLP Bibliography Server
• ACM SIGMOD
• IEEE Data Engineering Bulletin
• VLDB Foundation
• Stanford Database Group

• My brothers Agustín and Matías Gravano