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FORWARD: Far-Out Reach to Worldwide Access and Retrieval of Data

Or, if you wish, Fairly Obsessed in the Romance of the Web And Relational Databases. The FORWARD group focuses on data access and retrieval, led byProfessor Kevin C.C. Chang at the Computer Science Department, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. This site is FORWARD's public portal on our research, publications, people, demos, and datasets.

News and Highlights

  • (February 2018) Congrats Mangesh and folks! The paper of the foundational data modeling for DataSpread will go to Paris for ICDE 2018. Get PDF.
  • (January 2018) Looking for a survey for graph embedding? Look no further. Congrats to Hongyun and Vincent for the brand new survey-- comprehensive and full of insights :) Will appear in TKDE. Get PDF.
  • (December 2017) DataSpread Fall 2017 release. Check it out! New features include navigation of large spreadsheets, improved data importing, formatting, asynchronous formula evaluation, and multi-user access.
  • (January 2017) What is a "community"? What distinguishes one community from another? We proposed the interesting problem of community profiling-- and -- and it just got accepted to VLDB 2017! Congrats Vincent and Hongyun! Get PDF.
  • (January 2017) Our DataSpread project -- Interactive Database via Spreadsheet -- just made the first release! Check out Release 0.1.
  • (October 2016) Our paper "Semantic Proximity Search on Heterogeneous Graph by Proximity Embedding" is accepted to AAAI 2017! Get PDF.
(September 2016) Thanks NSF! Our DataSpread: Enabling Interactive Big Data Management project is awarded NSF Award 1633755, $1,795,429, BIGDATA: F: Bringing Interactive Data Management to Scientists, Analysts, and the Masses: A Holistic Unification of Spreadsheets and Databases. PI: Kevin C.C. Chang, and Co-PIs Karrie Karahalios and Aditya Parameswara. News.

(August 2016) Thanks NSF! Our BigSocial: Towards Big Social Data Platform for Entity-Centric and User-Aware Analytics project is awarded NSF Award 1619302, $500,000, III: Small: Social Discovery of Users and Content in Social Media Through Similarity-Based and Graph-Based Inference of Attributes and Queries. PI: Kevin C.C. Chang. News.