- Paolo Atzeni
Short biography
Paolo Atzeni is Database Professor and Vice-Rector for Education at Università Roma Tre,
where he was Head of the Department of Engineering from 2012 to 2017. He received his Dr. Ing. degree in Electrical Engineering
from Università di Roma "La Sapienza" in 1980. Before joining Università Roma Tre, he was with IASI-CNR in Rome,
then a faculty member at Università di Napoli and later a professor at Università di Roma La Sapienza. He also had
visiting appointments at the University of Toronto, at Università dell'Aquila and at Microsoft Research. He has worked
on various topics in the database field, including relational database theory, conceptual models and design tools, deductive databases,
databases and the Web, model management, cooperation of database systems. He is the founder of the database group at Roma Tre,
which includes five faculty members and various postdocs and students. They collaborate with various groups in Italy and abroad,
on topics that include data models, data warehouses, data in the Web world. He was trustee and the vicepresident of the VLDB
Endowment and president of the Executive Board of the EDBT Association.
Talk : Data extraction and integration, the issue is interpretation
Data are now pervasive, and many activities are really data-driven. Significant attention is given to the impact the volume has on the techniques, and this is clearly important. At the same time for most uses of data, the real challenge is in the interpretation of data and on the reliability of models built out of the data. This is clearly related to the size and variety of the available sources of data, but it is also the case that often the issue has to be dealt with well before considering significant volumes of data, and errors and failures are often caused by lack of interpretation. These issues will be exemplified with reference to a number of projects in data extraction and integration.