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Victor D. Vianu

Professor, Computer Science and Engineering



Reinventing the database in response to recent developments, including the emergence of the World Wide Web.

The Web itself can be seen as a huge distributed database. This fundamentally changes the very concept of a database. An expert in both classical database theory, logic, and data on the Web, Professor Vianu can put this dynamic into perspective. One contribution to classical database theory is the "relational machine," devised to better account for computational complexity in modern databases. Relational databases are accessed through abstract interfaces, making them easier to use, but masking low-level details both from users and classical mechanisms for analyzing complexity, such as Turing machines. Relational machines capture such complexity. Vianu has proven that automata theory provides a valuable tool for analyzing modern query languages on data in XML form, the emerging Web standard for data exchange. XML and the Web increasingly form Vianu's focus. He is: developing type-checking algorithms to guarantee the robustness of applications built using XML; studying database response to queries with only partial information available; and, exploring how useful data can be extracted from streams of XML wrapped data. Vianu has also worked on spatial databases, showing how queries can take advantage of annotations about the spatial data. For example, topological data about a geographic information system can significantly speed up query processing.

Capsule Bio:
Victor Vianu joined the UCSD faculty in 1983. He is one of two Jacobs School professors running UCSD's Database Laboratory. He has served as General Chair of SIGMOD,and Program Chair of the PODS and ICDT conferences. He is on the editorial board of the Journal of the ACM and the ACM Transactions on Computational Logic, and authored the standard graduate textbook on database theory. He received his Ph.D. in computer science from the USC in 1983.

Selected Publications:

Google Scholar Publications
Victor Vianu
Office Phone:
858-534-6227


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