LFCS Seminar: 18 September 2018 - Mourad Ouzzani

Title: The Data Civilizer – easing the Pain of Data Preparation

Abstract:

Enterprise data is usually scattered across departments and geographicregions, and it is often inconsistent. Data scientists spend most of their time finding, preparing, integrating, and cleaning relevant datasets. I will describe our efforts in easing the pain of data scientists through Data Civilizer, an end-to-end data preparation system. Key components of Data Civilizer include data discovery, data cleaning, data transformation, and entity resolution and consolidation. If time permits, I will also talk about Rayyan, a project at QCRI to help scientists sift through and filter scientific literature, especially in the context of systematic reviews. Rayyan serves more than 14.5k users worldwide.

Bio: Mourad Ouzzani is a Principal Scientist with the Qatar Computing Research Institute at Hamad Bin Khalifa University, Qatar Foundation. Before joining QCRI, Mourad was a Research Associate Professor at Purdue University. Since joining in 2011, Mourad has played a key role in establishing the Data Analytics group within QCRI. Mourad's research interests lie in the fields of data management and analytics with a focus on data integration and data cleaning. He is the project lead of Rayyan, the systematic reviews web and mobile app, that now serves more than 14.5k users worldwide. His work has led to numerous publications in top tier venues including PVLDB, TKDE, SIGMOD, and ICDE. Mourad has been PI or CoPI in more than 15 grant proposals funded by NSF, NIH, DHS, as well as other funding agencies. Mourad Ouzzani received two Seeds of Success Awards from Purdue University. Mourad Ouzzani hold a PhD from Virginia Tech, and a BSc and MSc from USTHB, Algiers, all in Computer Science.