Dept. of Computer Science
Tao Cheng University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
tcheng3@cs.uiuc.edu 201 N. Goodwin Ave.Urbana, IL 61801-2302
http://www.ews.uiuc.edu/~tcheng3/ (217) 244-6951 (office)

RESEARCH INTERESTS
My research interests lie in large scale data management, especially search and mining upon the ultimate data repository, the World Wide Web. I am particularly interested in \textbf{Entity Search}, beyond traditional web search of retrieving documents. I enjoy the process of building novel, useful, realistic search systems, identifying and solving real research problems that emerge in the process. My research interests touch upon computer science disciplines such as information retrieval, data mining, databases, machine learning, natural language processing, distributed system.

EDUCATION
Ph.D. Student, Computer Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 08/2004 - Now.
Advisor: Professor Kevin Chen-Chuan Chang

Ph.D. Student, Computer Science, University of California, Santa Barbara, 09/2003 - 06/2004.

B.S., Computer Science, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China, July 2003.
Graduated with honor from the Mixed Class of the Chu KeChen College

AWARDS AND HONORS
Yahoo Key Technical Challenge Award, 2007 (one out of twelve selected nation wide)
Conference of Innovative Database System Research (CIDR) Scholarship, 2007.
Excellent TA Award, Department of Computer Science, UCSB, 2004.
Superior Graduate Honor Certificate, ZJU, 2003.
Outstanding Graduation Thesis, ZJU, 2003.
Third Prize in the National Mathematical Contest in Modeling, Zhejiang, 2001.

RESEARCH EXPERIENCE
Entity Search
Research Assistant, Database and Information Systems Lab, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, IL, 2004-present
Advisor: Professor Kevin Chen-Chuan Chang
WISDM project: http://eagle.cs.uiuc.edu/wisdm
Aiming at proposing and building a novel Web Search Engine beyond document retrieval, that searches upon Entities, for instance, email, phone number, address, etc.

Clustering and Classifying XML Documents
Research Intern, Knowledge and Database Systems Lab, National Technical University of Athens, 2002
Mentor and Advisor: Dr. Theodore Dalamagas and Prof. Timos Sellis
Worked on clustering and classifying XML documents. The work resulted to (a) the design and implementation of an XML management system and (b) the publication of several research papers.

TEACHING EXPERIENCE
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, IL, USA
Teaching Assistant for CS101(Introduction to Computing), CS411(Database Systems), 2004 - 2007
Designed questions and solutions for homeworks and exams, graded homeworks and exams, mentored course projects, hold office hours, and gave several lectures.

University of California at Santa Barbara, CA, USA
Lectured lab sessions, helped students with projects, hold office hours, assisted in preparing exams, graded exams.

PUBLICATIONS

BOOK CHAPTERS

T. Dalamagas, T. Cheng and T. Sellis. "On the Usage of Structural Distance Metrics for Mining Hierarchical Structures". in Processing and Managing Complex Data for Decision Support, Idea Group Inc. 2005.

PAPERS IN REFEREED JOURNALS

T. Dalamagas, T. Cheng, K. J. Winkel and T. Sellis. "Clustering XML Documents by Structure". in Information Systems, vol. 33, no. 3, pages 187-228, 2006.

PAPERS IN REFEREED CONFERENCES

 
T.Cheng X. Yan and K. C.--C. Chang. "EntityRank: Searching Entities Directly and Holistically". In the Proceedings of the 33rd International Conference on Very Large Data Bases (VLDB 2007), Vienna, Austria, 2007.
 
T.Cheng X. Yan and K. C.--C. Chang. "Entity Search: Search Directly and Holistically". In the Proceedings of the 2007 ACM SIGMOD Conference (SIGMOD 2007), Beijing, China, June 2007. (Demo Paper)

T.Cheng and K. C.--C. Chang. "Entity Search Engine: Towards Large Scale Information Integration on the Web". In the Proceeding of the 3rd Conference of Innovative Database Systems Research (CIDR 2007), Asilomar, Jan 7-10, 2007. (Demo Paper)[PDF] [PPT]

PAPERS IN REFEREED WORKSHOPS

T. Dalamagas, T. Cheng, K. J. Winkel and T. Sellis. "Clustering XML documents using structural summaries". In the Proceedings of the EDBT Workshop on Clustering Information over the Web (ClustWeb 2004), Heraklion, Greece, 2004.

PAPERS IN SUBMISSION


TECHNICAL REPORT

J. M. Kelley, K. C.--C. Chang, T.Cheng , S. Chuang, W. Davis. "Weaving Entities into Relations: From Page Retrieval to Relation Mining on the Web". Report No. UIUCDCS-R-2004-2521 (Engr. No. UILU-ENG-2004-1810), November, 2004. [PDF]

PROFESSIONAL SERVICES
External Conference Reviewer: CIKM 2006, ICDE 2007, 2006, 2005, ICDM 2006, 2005, SDM 2007, SIGMOD 2006, 2005, VLDB 2007, WAIM 2007, 2006, WWW 2006, 2005.

REFERENCES
Available upon request.