• Efficient Structure Search over Large Graphs,
  supported by Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery Grant (DP120104168), 2011-2013.

In this project, I developed novel efficient models and computation paradigms for fast structural similarity search on large-scale networks. I also devised a number of optimization techniques to speed up the computations of the state-of-the-art similarity measures (e.g., SimRank, SimFusion, Penetrating Rank, and Random Walk with Restart), and reduced their memory requirements. My recent publications on ACM SIGIR12, ACM SIGIR13, and IEEE ICDE13 are supported by this project.

• A Mixed Row- and Column-Store Architecture for DBMS,
  supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) (similar to Australia ARC), No.61070031, 2010-2013

This project aims to design a novel DB system that can effectively combine both row- and column-optimized capabilities in a single DBMS. While traditional column stores are read-optimized and row stores are write-optimized, it is possible for row-oriented DB systems to achieve some benefits of column-oriented layout. In this project, I developed novel joining techniques, and emulated the physical layout of a column-store in a row-store via a number of techniques, such as vertical partitioning, tuples reconstruction, and predicates rewriting.

• Formulating Business Artifact-Centric Operational Model,
  collaborate with the research group of Prof. Jianwen Su at UC Santa Barbara (UCSB), 2007-2008.

Business artifacts are data objects whose operations define the processes in a business model (noun-centric), as opposed to the traditional business process that focuses on the actions (verb-centric). In this project, I developed analysis techniques for artifact-centric modeling, with the focus on its two critical issues, i.e, task redundancy and data independency. This research will help the development of automatic analysis tools for operational models.

• CodeWorker: A Smart Code Generator for ASP.NET Web Pages,
  intern at Shanghai Dear-Sound Information & Technology Co., Ltd., 2005-2006.

When I was developing management information systems (MIS) via ASP.NET + C# as an intern, I observed that many web pages usually share similar paradigms. To reduce repetitive coding for ASP.NET, I thereby devised an efficient code generator, namely CodeWorker, for automating the creation of similar ASP.NET web pages in less time with high quality. This is a template-driven tool that combines metadata with custom templates to produce web pages with consistent paradigms, thus significantly improving my efficiency of software development.