Dr. Alon Y. Halevy

Alon Y. Halevy, Ph.D., FACM is currently at Google Inc., managing a group looking into how structured data can be used in web search. Until recently, he was a professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington. He was elected ACM Fellow in 2006.
 
The main goal of his work (both on the research and product development) is to build tools that simplify people’s access to data, typically in complex data environments which he refers to as dataspaces. To support this goal, his areas of interest are integrating data from multiple (structured and unstructured) sources, machine learning approaches to resolving schema heterogeneity, personal information management, management of XML data, and query processing and optimization.
 
He is very interested in the combination of techniques from Artificial Intelligence and Data Management. He believes that the data management community should shift its focus away from enterprise computing and consider consumer-facing applications. Dataspaces offer an abstraction at which problems relevant to consumer-facing applications can be addressed.
 
Alon earned his Bachelors degree in Computer Science and Mathematics from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem in 1988, and his Ph.D in Computer Science from Stanford University in 1993. From 1993 to 1997, He was a principal member of technical staff at AT&T Bell Laboratories, and then at AT&T Laboratories. He joined the faculty of the Computer Science and Engineering Department at the University of Washington in 1998.
 
His research interests are in data integration, semantic heterogeneity, personal information management, management of XML data, web-site management, peer-data management systems, query optimization, database theory, knowledge representation, and more generally, the intersection between Database and AI technologies. His research developed several systems, such as the Information Manifold data integration system, the Strudel web-site management system, and the Tukwila XML data integration system. He was also a co-developer of XML-QL, which later contributed to the development of XQuery standard In 1999, Alon cofounded Nimble Technology, one of the first companies in the Enterprise Information Integration space. In 2004, he founded Transformic Inc., a company that creates search engines for the deep web, content residing in databases behind web forms.
 
Alon was a Sloan Fellow (1999–2000), and received the U.S. Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) in 2000. He serves on the editorial boards of the VLDB Journal, the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research (currently, a member of the advisory committee), and ACM Transactions on Internet Technology. He served as the program chair for the ACM SIGMOD 2003 Conference, and has given several keynotes at top conferences.
 
Read the full list of his publications. Watch A conversation with senior Google engineer, Alon Halevy. Read his LinkedIn profile. Read his blog.