GeoFlow Takes Data for a 3-D Drive In November, during the SharePoint Conference 2012, attendees received a Public Preview of project codename “GeoFlow” for Excel, the latest business-intelligence (BI) functionality to be integrated with Microsoft Excel 2013 later this year. As an Excel add-in, GeoFlow provides interactive, 3-D geospatial and temporal data visualizations. It enables information workers to discover and share new insights from data through rich, 3-D data on a globe and fluid, cinematic guided tours—virtual cinematography moving through data. With dynamic data exploration that turns rows and columns of spatiotemporal data into rich 3-D maps, the term “add-in” really doesn’t do justice to the technology behind GeoFlow, a preview of which is available for download. But even while Curtis Wong, principal researcher at Microsoft Research Redmond, was busy giving talks about WWT, he had further ambitions in mind for the technology. GeoFlow visualization of global city population
Entity Resolution Framework News Jan. 2012: Our paper on Pay-As-You-Go ER [11] has been accepted to the IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering. Overview The goal of the SERF project is to develop a generic infrastructure for Entity Resolution (ER). In our approach, the functions that "match" records (i.e. decide whether they represent the same entity) and "merge" them are viewed as black-boxes, which permits generic, extensible ER solutions. Some of the challenges we are addressing in the SERF project include: Performance: Entity resolution algorithms must perform a very large number of comparisons. Papers [1] Swoosh: A Generic Approach to Entity ResolutionOmar Benjelloun, Hector Garcia-Molina, David Menestrina, Qi Su, Steven Euijong Whang, Jennifer Widom. [2] D-Swoosh: A Family of Algorithms for Generic, Distributed Entity ResolutionOmar Benjelloun, Hector Garcia-Molina, Heng Gong, Hideki Kawai, Tait Larson, David Menestrina, Sutthipong Thavisomboon. Software People Faculty Students Steven Whang Alumns