Research 2006
Building a Better Database
Yangjun Chen
Associate Professor, Applied Computer Science
Every day, internet users sift through billions of web pages, readers search for a single paper in an entire library, travel agents book flights or hotels. All are activities that depend on fast, accurate searches of computer databases. Behind the simple computer interface that asks for a few keywords are the computer programs that control the search. These programs are not so simple.
Associate Professor Yangjun Chen studies programs that control database searches and develops new ways of organizing and searching through databases.
“My research has two purposes,” says Chen. “One is to increase the speed of information searching. The other is to get more exact information. If you Google, you use a keyword search but of the documents you get back, a lot of them are not what you want. If the result is more exact, you can save time.”
Chen and his students solve these kinds of problems using mathematics and computer programming. Then they test the solutions with computer experiments.
Chen’s most revolutionary research involves a new indexing method that speeds up database searches, called signature trees.
“To find a book in a library quickly you just can’t search the books one by one, so you use an index,” says Chen. “It’s the same thing with databases.”
Signature trees are a new kind of index with universal applications. Signature trees will speed up searches in any database and may become incorporated into the next generation of commercial databases. Now that this problem is solved, Chen is on to other mathematical and computer programming database challenges.
Once again, his studies focus on developing programs to increase the speed of database searches. “To find something quickly is always important,” says Chen, a challenge which appeals to his analytical nature. “I must have some problem in my brain every day. I’m always thinking about how to solve a problem.”
To learn more about his research on databases, contact University of Winnipeg faculty member Yangjun Chen at y.chen@uwinnipeg.ca