CIRSS Seminar: Melanie Herschel

Melanie Herschel, professor of computer science at the University of Stuttgart, Germany, will present "Query-based why-not provenance."

Abstract: The goal of why-not provenance is to explain why some expected data do not appear in the result of a data transformation. When constraining the data transformation to queries over relational data, the reasons for the missing results still abound, e.g., some input data may be missing in the source tables, the query may be too selective, the query may be faulty in the sense it uses wrong operators, etc. After a general introduction to why-not provenance, this talk reviews different types of why-not provenance. Among those, we then focus on approaches that define their explanations based on the query, which are called query-based explanations. The talk will introduce several algorithms to compute such query-based why-not provenance and conclude with a critical discussion of these, as well as with some directions for future research.

Melanie Herschel is a full professor at the Department of Computer Science at University of Stuttgart, Germany. After her PhD from Humboldt-University Berlin, Germany, she did post-doctoral research both in Germany and at IBM Research - Almaden, before becoming an Associate Professor and INRIA team member at the University of Paris South, France. Her main research interests lie in data provenance, data integration, data wrangling, and data exploration. Her research has been published in renowned international conferences and journals (e.g., ACM SIGMOD, VLDB, VLDB Journal, IEEE TKDE). She is an associate editor of the VLDB Journal and PC chair of EDBT 2019. Prior services in the research community, besides PC and review board memberships, include Provenance Week 2018 co-PC chair and SIGMOD 2016 publicity chair.