The Advances in Data, Visual, and Information Science Research Laboratory (ADVIS) is part of the Department of Computer Science, College of Engineering at the University of Illinois at Chicago. ADVIS hosts students doing research in computer information management systems with particular emphasis on database and information systems and related issues such as: semantic web (and in particular semantic data integration and semantic desktop), geospatial information systems, context-aware systems, information visualization (including graph drawing), retrieval and presentation of multimedia information, and information retrieval and classification.
This research lab has existed since 1994 (first with the name DBVIS, for Database
Visualization) and after 1997
with the current name, reflecting the fact that we focus on all types of information and not only on information
that can be stored in and retrieved from traditional database systems. The group has comprised several PhD, MS,
and BS students collaborating in research and publishing papers in competitive international conferences and in
journals. Over the years, the group has regularly sponsored the visit of several leading US and European researchers
and of postdocs.
Group Activities
Send email to advis@cs.uic.edu, if you would like to receive email notices concerning group meetings and other ADVIS-related news.
The group is led by Professor Isabel Cruz. There are several students, postdocs, and visitors involved in research. See available positions, if you would like to join the lab. Check the page on graduation rules for writing suggestions and deadlines.
The group has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the Department of Defense, NATO, CRA, and corporate gifts.
The group is currently working on six projects:
Other projects of the group:
This system tightly integrates a visual query language for distributed queries with the layout specification that can emphasize the information semantics. We are continuing this work in several directions, including the use of ontologies to aid in query refinement, the integration of security concerns, and the creation of metadata for the synchronized retrieval and presentation of the information.
The basis of this system is a visual meta-query language for displaying and querying
object-oriented databases, called DOODLE. Features of the system include the support of user defined query languages
and visualizations. Currently we are continuing work on: (1) semi-automatic visualizations; (2) use of metadata
to generate visualizations; and (3) using dynamic constraint solving for positioning optional visual components.
This project is on a powerful authoring tool that integrates and presents marked-up
information that is available on the web and gives powerful customization capabilities to the users (publishers
and end-users). The result of this research is being directly incorporated into the ACM SIGMOD Digital Symposium
Collection. We are extending PANDA to incorporate: visual query languages and metadata support.
We have been investigating automatic classification of Web documents. We studied
the recall based on the structural analysis of more than 600,000 Web documents. We are investigating new algorithms
that improve recall.
This is a multimedia authoring project for the temporal synchronization of multimedia
streams. We have devised an efficient algorithm that determines whether synchronization can be achieved. Future
work includes integrating this approach into SMIL.
This project optimally partitions the software components of a typical algorithm
animation system and leverages the power of the Java language. This system is currently used for geometric algorithms
(with the Computational Geometry Center at Brown U.).
In this project users upon entering a Web site are given hints reflecting the
interests of the previous thousands of visits to the site. In order to take into account the information previously
gathered, efficient database mining of the previously collected data and the building of relevant aggregate information
are performed. We are developing other collaborative filtering algorithms within the same architecture.
Until 2001 the lab was "home" to the ACM SIGMOD Digital Symposium Collection (DiSC),
an electronic journal that is the most extensive yearly source of database publications.
Thanks to Chad Pytel for the nice rendition of the ADVIS logo.