Professor Renée J. Miller has been named the Canada Excellence Research Chair in Data Intelligence. She is currently a University Distinguished Professor at Khoury College of Computer Science at Northeastern University. She will be joining the University of Waterloo in June 2024 as the Cheriton School of Computer Science’s first Canada Excellence Research Chair.
Launched in 2008, the Canada Excellence Research Chairs Program supports Canadian universities in their efforts to build on the nation’s growing reputation as a global leader in research and innovation by supporting world‑renowned researchers and their teams to establish ambitious research programs at Canadian universities.
“Professor Miller is a world-renowned computer scientist working in the field of data systems, in particular on data integration, whose pioneering research is recognized widely across academia and industry,” said Raouf Boutaba, Professor and Director of the Cheriton School of Computer Science. “We congratulate her on being named a Canada Excellence Research Chair and very much look forward to her joining us next year.”
Professor Miller received her PhD in computer science from the University of Wisconsin, Madison and bachelor’s degrees in mathematics and cognitive science from MIT. She is an editor-in-chief of the VLDB Journal and former president of the non-profit Very Large Data Base Foundation.
Professor Miller’s research combines theoretical elegance with industrial impact for which she has received many prestigious awards, honours and citations. Among them, she is a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, and a recipient of a US Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, the highest honour bestowed by the US government to outstanding scientists and engineers beginning their careers. She has also received a National Science Foundation CAREER Award, an Ontario Premier’s Research Excellence Award, and an IBM Faculty Award. In 2018, she received the VLDB Women in Database Research Award, which recognizes a woman researcher who has made significant technical contributions to the field, and the 2020 CS-Can | Info-Can Lifetime Achievement Award in Computer Science. She formerly held the Bell Canada Chair of Information Systems at the University of Toronto.
Initially, Professor Miller’s research focused on the long-standing open problem of data integration and has achieved the goal of building practical data integration systems adopted by industry. Among the many awards for research that she and her colleagues have received is the 2013 International Conference on Database Theory Test-of-Time Award for Data Exchange: Semantics and Query Answering, a paper praised for “initiating a new line of research, and providing a beautiful conceptual contribution, rich of challenging questions, which has constantly attracted the community in the last ten years, and still attracts many valuable research efforts.” For this research, she and her colleagues also received the 2020 Alonzo Church Award for Outstanding Contributions to Logic and Computation for the paper’s ground-breaking work on laying the logical foundations for data exchange.
Canada Excellence Research Chair in Data Intelligence
Data science is being done over massive data lakes containing datasets from different sources and datasets that have been updated and cleaned repeatedly and often incompletely. This creates a mess of slightly different versions and datasets that may have incomplete or ambiguous semantics. An important challenge in doing trustworthy data science is to enable scientists to find relevant datasets, recover and understand the meaning of different datasets and their versions, and integrate data in a way that fully and faithfully recovers all possible connections between facts. Data intelligence encompasses both the theory and practice of automating and scaling the intelligent, reliable, and trustworthy use of big data for data science and artificial intelligence.
As the Canada Excellence Research Chair in Data Intelligence, Professor Miller, her students and collaborators will continue to develop the mathematical foundations and methods to understand when data preparation or curation solutions are correct; develop preparation and curation methods that are correct, explainable, and reproducible; and develop frameworks for data curation that help data scientists document, share, and reproduce complex data preparation and curation processes.
Data
intelligence
is
concerned
with
the
data
preparation
and
data
engineering
portion
of
data
science.
Nonetheless,
machine
learning,
language
models,
and
knowledge
bases
are
important
tools
in
recovering
the
semantics
or
meaning
of
data.
Professor
Miller
will
develop
the
theory
and
practice
of
how
to
employ
these
and
other
foundational
tools,
including
network
science
and
data
management,
to
create
principled
data
curation
solutions.
This
research
is
critical
to
ensuring
the
insights
we
gain
from
data
are
valid
and
unbiased.
Data
intelligence
will
help
to
ensure
that
we
can
use
data
wisely
to
understand
possible
inequity
in
the
data
rather
than
blindly
building
models
that
repeat
past
inequities.
As
a
recognized
leader
in
efforts
to
increase
equity,
diversity
and
inclusion,
Professor
Miller
will
work
to
expand
the
number
of
data
science
trainees
from
marginalized
groups
by
exposing
them
to
the
power
of
telling
stories
through
the
careful
and
wise
use
of
data.