Fellow, IBM Centre For Advanced Studies

2010 – 2020. IBM Research, Toronto, Canada.

I am interested in interdisciplinary research projects that involve large data sets and computationally hard problems. One such example is large scale business data analytics (“big data”). In 2008, IBM purchased Cognos Corporation in Ottawa and established Ottawa as IBM’s main centre for data analytics in Canada. When installing big data systems for their clients, IBM encountered technical difficulties because their software tools had performance issues on very large data sets. That lead to discussions between IBM/Cognos and my research lab at Carleton University. The data analytics operations that created these performance issues were complex aggregate (group-by) queries on large data sets, with the additional challenge that those data sets were highly dynamic. IBM funded a research project in my lab to address this problem. Our solution and delivered prototype won an IBM Innovation Impact Of The Year Award, and I was appointed Fellow of the IBM Centre For Advanced Studies in Toronto, Canada.