Abstract: Users are faced with an increasing onslaught of data, whether it’s in their choices of movies to watch, assimilating data from multiple sources, or finding information relevant to their lives on open data registries. In this talk I discuss some of the recent and ongoing work about how to improve understanding and exploration of such data, particularly by users with little database background.

Short Bio: Rachel Pottinger is an Associate Professor in Computer Science at the University of British Columbia. She received her PhD in computer science from the University of Washington in 2004. Her main research interest is data management, particularly semantic data integration, how to manage metadata, how to manage data that is currently not well supported by databases, and how to make data easier to understand and explore.