Christopher M. Jermaine Assistant Professor Computer and Information Sciences and Engineering
	Contact Info Office: Room E456, CSE Building Address: University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, 32611-6120 Email: cjermain@cise.ufl.edu Phone: (352) 392-2691 Fax: (352) 392-1220
OfficeHours (Spring 2008): Tuesday and Wednesday 5 to 6 PM.

Research Interests

In general, I am interested in databases. I study how one might collect and manage one's data, and what one should do with it in order to get the most out of it. Much of my work has a significant statistical component. Three areas that I have particular interest in are approximate query processing, physical database design, and data mining. Each of these areas is described briefly below.

1.      Approximate query answering. A data warehouse is a huge information repository or archive that is gigabytes, terabytes or even petabytes in size. A data warehouse is quite different from a traditional database, in that it is used primarily to support data analysis and statistical processing (rather than transaction processing as in a traditional database). For many applications in data warehousing, a user will tolerate some error in the result of a statistical query, especially if he or she gets the answer back in a fraction of the time that would have been required to compute the exact answer. A long term project that we have recently begun working on is the development of the DB-Online database management system. Our goal in designing this system is to build a database that is as scaleable as Oracle or IBM's DB2, but that can give the user a statistically-meaningful guess as to the eventual answer to a query all the way from start to finish, so the user can abort the query as soon as he or she is satisfied with the accuracy. See our paper that appeared in SIGMOD 2007, and won the best paper award: Scalable Approximate Query Processing with the DBO System. You can find more detail on my interest in approximate query processing on the project page for my CAREER grant.

2.      Physical database design and indexing (especially for data warehousing). I am interested in a variety of traditional database research topics (such as distributed databases, indexing, and query processing).  For a representative paper, see A Novel Index Supporting High Volume Data Warehouse Insertion which appeared in the VLDB conference some time ago. We had a relevant paper in the 2006 VLDB Conference called Reference-Based Indexing of Sequence Databases. You can find more detail on my interest in physical design for data warehousing on the project page for my CAREER grant.

3.      Data mining. It has become something of a truism, but our modern world is characterized by huge amounts of electronic data. Being able to comb through this data and automatically discover patterns and relationships (i.e., "data mining") can have very positive, real-world results. For just one example, consider the problem of multiple antimicrobial drug resistance in hospital-acquired (nosocomial) infections. Nowadays, it is possible (though thankfully still uncommon) to go to the hospital for routine care only to become infected with a bacterial strain that cannot be treated by any existing antimicrobial drug. From a computer science standpoint, the interesting thing is that such "superbugs" did not spontaneously appear; they evolved over time due to the selective pressures exerted by years of use (and misuse) of antimicrobial drugs. Data mining methods can be very useful for combing through years of hospital data to try to understand how the resistance trends evolve over time, and perhaps to discover what statistical relationships exist between hospital prescription practices and the evolution of superbugs. The knowledge obtained could be used to prevent the evolution of superbugs in the future. My interests in this area overlap significantly with the fields of statistics, machine learning, and computational complexity theory. You can see more detail about my interests in data mining by going to the project page for my NSF-sponsored SEI project.

Funding

My research is currently funded through a CAREER grant and an SEI grant from the National Science Foundation. 

Publications

A (somewhat complete) list of my publications can be obtained from the DBLP server.

Teaching

I teach courses related to databases and (occasionally) discrete mathematics. This semester, I am teaching Database System Implementation.

Service

This academic year, I will serve on the research track program committees for VLDB 2008, KDD 2008, and JCDL 2008. I also serve as an associate editor for the Very Large Databases Journal. Last spring, I was on the the PC for VLDB 2007 and KDD 2007. I was also one of the co-PC chairs for ICISTM 2007 held in New Delhi, India.

Biography

Here is my biography, written in the traditional third person:

Chris Jermaine is an assistant professor in the CISE Department at the University of Florida, where he studies databases and data management with a group of exceptional students. He is the recipient of a 2008 Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Research Fellowship, a National Science Foundation CAREER award, and a 2007 ACM SIGMOD Best Paper Award. He received a BA from the Mathematics Department at UCSD, an MSc from the Computer Science and Engineering Department at OSU (his advisor at OSU was Renee Miller, who is now at Toronto), and a PhD from the College of Computing at Georgia Tech (his advisor at Georgia Tech was Ed Omiecinski). Chris grew up in Southern California. In his spare time, he enjoys running, gardening, and outdoor activities such as hiking, climbing, and whitewater boating. In one particular exploit, he and his wife floated a whitwater raft (home-made from scratch using a sewing machine, glue, and plastic) over 100 miles down the Nizina River (and beyond) in Alaska. 

Notes to Prospective Students

Unfortunately, I am not looking for PhD and MS students at this moment, since I have more great students than I can handle.

If you have not been admitted to our department, please click here.  If you are an undergraduate interested in doing a senior project or a directed research study with me, please click here. 

Last modified: March 5th, 2008