Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

The objective of the proposed research program is to investigate algorithms, user interface (UI) design and system level implementation toward a {\em humanized database system}. In particular, we propose to revisit many aspects of the database technology for the next generation of personal computing environment from an user-centric approach. We are interested in aspects including, but not limited to, query interfaces, visualization and summarization of data, automatic schema inference, information extraction and integration of data sources in the runtime environments of mobile devices and servers in the cloud. We envision that the humanized database provides an expressive querying interface allowing user inputs to include touch, gestures, and speech in addition to the tradition methods. Furthermore, the humanized database organizes data feeds with minimal manual intervention. It should infer and maintain the database schema and provides visual summaries of the meta data and the data of the database. Thus, the database serves as an autonomous agent which interacts with the end user directly.