Abstract: The EDAM project is a collaborative effort between computer scientists and environmental chemists at Carleton College and UW Madison. The goal is to develop data mining techniques for advancing the state of the art in analyzing atmospheric aerosol datasets. The traditional approach for particle measurement which is the collection of bulk samples of particulates on filters is not adequate for studying particle dynamics and real time correlations. This has led to the development of a new generation of real time instruments that provide continuous or semi-continuous streams of data about certain aerosol properties. However, these instruments have added a significant level of complexity to atmospheric aerosol data and dramatically increased the amounts of data to be collected managed and analyzed. We are investigating techniques for automatically labeling mass spectra from different kinds of aerosol mass specctrometers and then analyzing and exploring the rich spatiotemporal information collected from multiple geographically distributed instruments.

In this talk I will present an overview of some novel data mining problems, describe some of the techniques we are developing to address them, and discuss the broader applicability of these techniques to problems from other domains.

Short Bio: Raghu Ramakrishnan is Professor of Computer Sciences at the University of Wisconsin Madison and was Chairman and CTO of QUIQ, a company that pioneered collaborative customer support and was acquired by Kanisa. His research is in the area of database systems with a focus on data retrieval analysis and mining. He and his group have developed scalable algorithms for clustering decision tree construction and itemset counting and were among the first to investigate mining of continuously evolving stream data. His work on query optimization has found its way into several commercial database systems and his work on extending SQL to deal with queries over sequences has influenced the design of window functions in SQL 1999. He has authored over 100 technical papers and written the widely used text Database Management Systems, WCB McGraw Hill, now in its third edition with J Gehrke. He is a past editor-in-chief of the Journal of Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery, is an Associate Editor for ACM Transactions on Database Systems, and serves on the Board of Trustees of the VLDB Endowment. Dr Ramakrishnan is a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery, ACM, and has received several awards including a Packard Foundation Fellowship in Science and Engineering, an NSF Presidential Young Investigator Award, and an ACM SIGMOD Contributions Award.