Grant: Canada Research Chairs

The size and complexity of today's information systems dwarf those of five, let alone twenty-five, years ago. Demands of modern applications are moving from ""large"" databases comprising a few billion bytes, or gigabytes, of information to systems of several terabytes (one trillion bytes) and even petabytes. As demand escalates, the manner in which data is organized and the algorithms (or problem-solving methods) used to manipulate information become increasingly critical. More effective techniques that address time and space constraints must be created to allow large systems to better perform sophisticated searches and updates. In tandem with this application driven work, is the fundamental notion of actually proving that the methods developed are indeed the best possible for the tasks at hand.