Research Announcement
Acxiom Research
Acxiom Corporation informed the Computer Science and Computer Engineering Department today that they will provide $40K continuation funding in 2008-2009 for two projects started in June 2007. Drs. Wingning Li and Craig Thompson and graduate research assistants Reid Phillips, Wesley Deneke, and Joshua Eno staff the projects. Acxiom is a leader in customer data integration. They use grids of thousands of PCs to process huge data sets for their customers. Each task is specified as a workflow that can take hundreds of files as input and can process the inputs to organize, improve, and augment data quality. The two projects contribute as follows:
* Layout Inferencing Project - Presently, Acxiom receives thousands of files a month, each consisting of structured records but in varying formats with a wide range of contents. Humans have to discover and specify file formats. This research project samples files statistically augmented with a partial specification of common content types and suggests a file layout format, partially automating the task that humans perform manually now.
* Domain Specific Modeling Language - For each customer and collection of files, Acxiom associates currently manually define a complex workflow to improve the data quality, merge, and augment the contents. The DSML research project aims to define a high level intent language that associates can use to specify the goal of the workflow. A problem solver automatically generate a workflow that defines how to achieve the goal.
