Research Interests

All things data: Databases, “Big data” systems, distributed data management, data provenance and curation, scientific data management.

Current Research Areas with Project Descriptions

Databases for Sciences: Improving Database Support for Scientific Computing As scientists struggle with increasingly larger amounts of data, it is natural to host data within a data management system that simplifies operations on data, provides guarantees on performance and correctness, and enables analyses. Relational database management systems have long been applied to scientific computing, but increasingly have been found inefficient for scientific computing. Our goal is to invent new principles for data management that are more suitable for scientific computing and innovatively apply existing principles (the basis for relational DBMSs) to scientific computing.

SciDataspaces: Dataspaces for Reproducible Research and Sharing of Scientific Results Science is disseminated primarily through published articles. But how to verify and validate a science experiment in which the adopted scientific method is purely computational and data-driven? Adopting reproducible tools and practices as part of the scientific method can help in subsequent validation. We are developing a dataspace that helps scientists conduct reproducible science.

Improving Scholarly Communication We focus on systems that improve user experience on research networking (RN) systems by finding new incentives for participation, improving the search and expert-finding mechanisms, and determining the need for RN systems in collaborative and inter-disciplinary sciences.

Students: If you are interested in an internship, research assistantship, or research experience (CAP projects) in databases/data management research, please contact me at tanum-AT-uchicago-DOT-edu for further details.
Current openings include (but are not limited to):
-- Spatio-temporal databases student position
-- SciDataspace student position
-- ResearchBit student position
If you send an email, please send your CV and why you are interested in the project.

Teaching

Advanced Databases, Masters Program in Computer Science, University of Chicago.

Selected Recent Publications

• 1. Sharing and Reproducing Database Applications
  Quan Pham, Severin Thaler, Tanu Malik, Ian T. Foster, Boris Glavic.
  In PVLDB, volume 8, 2015. [bibtex] [pdf]
  
  
• 2. An invariant framework for conducting reproducible computational science
  Haiyan Meng, Rupa Kommineni, Quan Pham, Robert Gardner, Tanu Malik, Douglas Thain.
  In Journal of Computational Science, volume 9, 2015. [bibtex] [pdf] [doi]
  
  
• 3. GEN: a database interface generator for HPC programs
  Quan Pham, Tanu Malik.
  In Scientific and Statistical Database Management,(SSDBM), 2015. [bibtex] [pdf] [doi]
  
  
• 4. Plenario: An Open Data Discovery and Exploration Platform for Urban Science.
  Charlie Catlett, Tanu Malik, Brett Goldstein, et. al.
  In IEEE Data Engineering Bulletin, volume 37, 2014. [bibtex] [pdf]
  

  [Full list, Area-wise, Dblp]

• Theses:
  
  Large-Scale Data Management for the Sciences.
  Tanu Malik, Ph.D. Thesis. Department of Computer Science, Johns Hopkins University.
  [pdf]

Current Students/Interns

Graduated Students

Engineers

Professional Service

Proposals: NSF Panelist 2009, 2012, 2013, 2015

NSF EarthCube: Data Discovery, Access and Mining (co-Chair), TAC Gap Analysis Working Group (co-Chair)

Session Chair: eScience, 2012

Reviewer:
   Conferences: INFOCOMP 2016, IPAW 2016, SSDBM 2015, KDDA 2015, IPAW 2014, eScience 2012, 2013, 2014, ICDE (external reviewer) 2009
   Journals: Information Sciences, Future Generation Computer Systems, Concurrency and Computation
   Workshops: eSON