Information Management and Data Mining

Description:
The field of information management and data mining concerns the collection, management and intelligent analysis of large-scale data repositories. Our research aims to help realizing the dream of making data, and the associated knowledge hidden within, available anywhere, any time, and in any possible format. We are studying best practices concerning the organization of and control over the structure, processing and delivery of information, especially within the e-commerce framework. Furthermore, our research aims to extract useful knowledge from these sources, by the development of new techniques to seamlessly mine complex databases.  

Applications:
This research area has applications in a variety of areas, including e-commerce, health care systems management, anthropometry, and bioinformatics, amongst many others. Our research includes the simulation of a complete data warehouse at a major teaching hospital and three major health care processes.  We also have developed a data mining system for consumer profiling, based on anthropometric measurements, demographics and 3D body shapes.

PROFESSORS:

• Kiringa, Iluju
  databases; data sharing, exchange, integration, and coordination; active databases; advanced transaction models; knowledge representation / Group

• Peyton, Liam
  medical informatics, business process management, decision support, data warehousing, and architectures for privacy preserving distributed data mining

• Tran, Thomas T.
  e-commerce, intelligent agents, multi-agent systems, trust and reputation modeling, intelligent Information Systems, recommendation systems, and architecture for mobile e-business

• Viktor, Herna L.
  data mining of complex, large-scale databases, data warehousing, health informatics, anthropometry, multimedia data mining (group)

Research groups involving several professors:

• Ontario Research Network on Electronic Commerce - Information and Communications Technologies (ORNEC-ICT)

Leadership:

• In our Intelligent Data Warehouse Laboratory, we have built a state of the art data warehouse (20 Terabyte) and blade center infrastructure (28 dual processor servers) to simulate real-world scenarios in e-commerce, and in particular Health Care and Anthropometry (Peyton and Viktor).

• Innovative Application Award for a system for Virtual Tailoring at the Principles and Practices in Knowledge Discovery from Databases Conference (Viktor).

Some recent projects:

• Evolving e-health business processes around accessible data warehouses (Peyton, Partners: Cognos, Telelogic, Sybase, The Ottawa Hospital, funded by ORNEC) show details
• Long-term preservation of software dependent data (Viktor, Partners: IBM Canada, IIT-NRC, funded by ORNEC)
• Modeling trust and reputation in e-commerce; Designing e-commerce recommender systems; Designing Intelligent Business Software Agents for e-Commerce (Tran; funded by NSERC and ORNEC)
• Virtual garment tailoring through cluster analysis and classification (Viktor; funded by CFI, OIT, ORNEC and IBM Canada)
• Developing a peer-to-peer (P2P) information management system consisting of a large collection of peer data management systems (PDBMSs) located at the nodes of a P2P network; thus building communities of interest centered on dedicated businesses (Kiringa, Partners: University of Toronto, funded by NSERC, CITO/OCE and Bell Canada)