Yasin N. Silva

Student obtained 2nd place in New College's Reseach Expo!

Two of my students, Lisa Tsosie and Spencer Pearson, participated in the New College’s Undergraduate Student Research and Creative Projects Expo 2013 (ASU). They both did a great job presenting their research posters. Lisa presented her work on Facebully (identification of cyberbullying in Facebook) and Spencer presented his work on index-based similarity joins. Lisa obtained the second prize in the Mathematical and Natural Sciences category. Congratulations Lisa!

We received an Amazon Educational Grant!

We have been recently selected to receive an AWS in Education Coursework grant! This Amazon grant will play a key role in our efforts to integrate highly distributed technologies, particularly the MapReduce framework and Big Data analysis using Hadoop, into the Applied Computing curricula at ASU-West. The award will provide our students with AWS credits and will be used in our advanced databases and distributed systems courses (Spring and Fall 2013).

ASU News video highlights research with one of my undergraduate students

An ASU News video highlights the research work performed by undergraduate students and ASU faculty under the NCUIRE (New College Undergraduate Inquiry and Research Experiences) program. NCUIRE enables a close interaction between students and faculty members at ASU-West to perform high-quality research. The video highlights, among others, the work with one of my undergraduate students (Spencer Pearson). You can watch the video here.

Faculty Doctoral Mentoring Institute

On March 4th, 2013, I participated in the 6th Arizona MGE@MSA Faculty Doctoral Mentoring Institute held at the Arizona State University Tempe Campus. This institute was a great opportunity to discuss and learn more about how we can increase the participation and retention of underrepresented groups in higher education. I particularly enjoyed meeting and talking with Richard Tapia, a distinguished professor who has inspired many African-American, Native American and Latino/Latina students to pursue careers in computing and mathematics.

Collaborative Research Project: ASU - HP Labs

I recently started a collaborative project with Rares Vernica from HP Labs. In this project (“MapReduce-based Parallel Face Clustering”), we are studying techniques to efficiently support distributed similarity-aware operators that use face-similarity functions on complex face-feature vectors.

Undergraduate research proposal funded

Our undergraduate research proposal entitled "FaceBully: Identifying Cyberbullying Behavior in Facebook” has been awarded funding from the Western Alliance to Expand Student Opportunities (WAESO). I look forward to keep collaborating in this project with my student Lisa Tsosie during Spring 2013.

Paper accepted in the VLDB Journal!

Our paper "Similarity Queries: Their Conceptual Evaluation, Transformations, and Processing", Y.N. Silva, W.G. Aref, P.-A. Larson, S. Pearson and M.H. Ali, has been accepted in the VLDB Journal. In this paper we focus on the study of similarity queries that contain one or multiple first-class similarity database operators (Similarity Selection, Similarity Join, and Similarity Group-by). We introduce a comprehensive conceptual evaluation model for similarity queries, and present a rich set of transformation rules to extend cost-based query optimization to the case of similarity queries. Congratulations to all my co-authors!

We received an Amazon Research Grant!

Our proposal "Similarity Join Operators for Cloud Systems" recently received an Amazon Web Services (AWS) Research grant. We look forward to keep using Amazon’s great cloud services in our research work!

ASU News story features the participation of my students in VLDB and Cloud-I

A story in ASU News featured the participation of two of my undergraduate students (Spencer Pearson and Jason Reed) in the VLDB conference and VLDB/Cloud-I workshop in Istanbul, Turkey. Congrats Spencer and Jason! Link to the story.

Undergraduate research proposal funded

Our undergraduate research proposal entitled "Study, Evaluation and Comparison of Similarity-aware Algorithms for Clouds Systems” has been awarded funding from the Western Alliance to Expand Student Opportunities (WAESO). I look forward to working in this project with Lisa Tsosie, an outstanding undergraduate student in the Applied Computing program.

VLDB 2012 Travel Fellowship Awards

Two of my undergraduate students, Jason Reed and Spencer Pearson, received the VLDB 2012 Travel Fellowship awards. The awards will allow them to attend VLDB’12 and Cloud-I in Istanbul, Turkey. I look forward to presenting with them the results of our research work. Congratulations Jason and Spencer!

Paper accepted in VLDB/Cloud-I 2012

Our paper "MapReduce-based Similarity Join for Metric Spaces", Y. N. Silva, J. M. Reed and L. M. Tsosie, has been accepted in the The VLDB International Workshop on Cloud Intelligence (VLDB/Cloud-I 2012). This paper is co-authored with two of my undergraduate students (Jason Reed and Lisa Tsosie). We look forward to presenting our paper in Istanbul!.

Paper accepted in VLDB 2012!

Our demonstration paper "Exploiting Database Similarity Joins for Metric Spaces", Y. N. Silva and S. Pearson, has been accepted in the 38th International Conference on Very Large Databases (VLDB 2012). This paper is co-authored with my undergraduate student Spencer Pearson, who did a great job implementing our Similarity Join operator in PostgreSQL. At VLDB, we will present the operator and demonstrate how it can be efficiently used in real-world applications.

News story features my work with two undergraduate students

A story in the ASU New College Newsletter featured the research work with two of my students. The featured work has been developed under two NCUIRE (New College Undergraduate Inquiry and Research Experiences Program) funded projects. NCUIRE is a great ASU program that supports research partnerships between faculty and undergraduate scholars. Link to the story.

Demo Paper accepted in SIGMOD 2012!

Our demo paper "Exploiting MapReduce-based Similarity Joins", Y. N. Silva and J. M. Reed, has been accepted in the 2012 ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of Data. This paper is co-authored with my undergraduate student Jason Reed. We look forward to presenting our MapReduce-based Similarity Join operator at SIGMOD '12.

Paper accepted in ICDE 2012!

Our paper "Exploiting Common Subexpressions for Cloud Query Processing", Y. N. Silva, P. -A. Larson, J. Zhou has been accepted as a full paper for publication in the proceedings of the 28th IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE) 2012 and for full-length oral presentation at the conference. ICDE '12 will take place in Washington, DC, USA. Congratulations to my co-authors. See you in Washington DC!

Demo paper accepted in ACM SIGMOD 2010!

Our Demo paper "SimDB: A Similarity-aware Database System", Y. N. Silva, A. M. Aly, W. G. Aref, P. -A. Larson was accepted in the 2010 ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of Data. The SIGMOD ’10 conference will take place in the city of Indianapolis, Indiana, on June 6-11, 2010. See you there!

I am now a U.S. Citizen!

I recently obtained U.S. Citizenship. I am very excited to be part of this great country in this new role and I am very proud of being both American and Peruvian!

I would like to thank the VisaJourney online community for all the useful information that guided me during the naturalization process.

Two papers accepted in ICDE 2010!

Our research paper "The Similarity Join Database Operator", Y. N. Silva, W. G. Aref, and M. Ali was accepted as a Full Paper in the 26th IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE) 2010. Our paper "Supporting Real-world Activities in Database Management Systems", M.Y. Eltabakh, W.G. Aref, A.K. Elmagarmid, Y.N. Silva, and M. Ouzzani was also accepted in the same conference as a short paper. The ICDE ’10 conference will take place in Los Angeles, USA. Congratulations to all my co-authors!

Paper accepted in the VLDB PhD Workshop 2009!

Our research paper "Similarity-aware Query Processing and Optimization", Y. N. Silva and W. G. Aref (Advisor) was accepted in the PhD workshop of the 35th International Conference on Very Large Data Bases. The VLDB PhD workshop is one of the premier forums for PhD students working in the area of data management systems. The VLDB ’09 conference will take place in Lyon, France.

Finished Summer '09 Internship at Microsoft Research

I spent the summer '09 at the Microsoft Research (MSR) lab in Redmond, WA where I had the honor and pleasure to work with Paul Larson and Jingren Zhou. My research task during this summer involved enhancing the optimizer of a massive data distributed management system to make efficient use of common query sub-expressions.

Being at Microsoft Research was also a great opportunity to interact with its great researchers; I especially enjoyed the discussions with different researchers of the Database and Data Management, Exploration and Mining groups. It was also a great experience to present the research work I have done at Purdue to MSR researchers and the results of my summer work to both the MSR researchers and the SQL Server team.
Together with my wife and two sons, I explored the beautiful parks and beaches during the weekends. We especially enjoyed exploring the rainforests at the Olympic Peninsula.

Paper and Demo accepted in ICDE 2009!

Our research paper "Similarity Group-by", Y. N. Silva, W. G. Aref, and M. Ali was accepted as a full paper in The 25th IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE) 2009. Our demo "Hippocratic PostgreSQL", J. Padma, Y. N. Silva, M. Arshad, W. G. Aref was also accepted in the same conference! Congratulations to all my co-authors!

Demo and Paper accepted in EDBT 2009!

Our demo paper "Exploiting Similarity-aware Grouping in Decision Support Systems", Y. N. Silva, M. U. Arshad, W. G. Aref. and our research paper "Supporting Annotations on Relations", M. Y. Eltabakh, W. G. Aref, A. K. Elmagarmid, M. Ouzzani, Y. N. Silva were recently accepted in the 12th International Conference on Extending Database Technology (EDBT), 2009 . The conference will be held in the beautiful city of Saint-Petersburg, Russia.

Finished Summer '08 Internship at IBM Research Almaden Center

My summer '08 was full of great challenges and a lot of fun working with the Information Management Group at the IBM Almaden Research Center (IBM ARC), San Jose, CA where I had the pleasure and honor to work with Guy Lohman and Sandeep Tata. My work at IBM ARC involved designing and prototyping a data management system that can inherently support unstructured and structured data.

This was a great opportunity to meet several other researchers at IBM Research and learn about other exciting projects currently in development at IBM. Lee Ann, Gabriel and I took advantage of the weekends to visit the surrounding national parks and beautiful coastal cities, and to spend time with new great friends.

Completed 'Mini-MBA' Program at The Krannert School of Management, May 2008

The beginning of my summer was packed with interesting business related classes and hands-on activities having been selected by the Computer Science Department to participate in the Applied Management Principles Program at the Krannert School of Management.

This executive education program is designed for select doctoral students in science and engineering and industry participants. We received instruction in interesting topics like accounting, human resource management, financial management, marketing, strategic management and entrepreneurship.