Personal Digital Data: Challenges and Opportunities

Abstract

The important question of how companies and organizations use our data has received a lot of attention in the technology and policy communities. An equally important question that deserves more focus going forward is how we, as individuals, can take advantage of the data we generate to improve our health, vitality, and productivity and our overall well-being. We create a variety of data throughout our days, including our photos, workout stats, locations we have been to, the stuff we buy online and the content we consume. Soon smart glasses will record our experiences in even more detail. However, our personal data is siloed in dozens of applications. Consequently, we often struggle to retrieve important facts from our past and build upon them to create satisfying experiences on a daily basis.

This talk will start by outlining the opportunities that can be unlocked if our data was fused in a way that serves us better. The speaker will then discuss some of the technical challenges that arise in pursuing this vision. In particular, the speaker will discuss recent developments on combining language models and structured data, which is critical to this agenda and to other applications of language models.

About the Speaker

Dr. Alon HALEVY is a director at Meta’s Reality Labs Research, where he works on Human Value Alignment, the combination of neural and symbolic techniques for data management and on responsible personal information management. Prior to Meta, Dr. Halevy was the CEO of Megagon Labs (2015-2018) and led the Structured Data Group at Google Research (2005-2015), where the team developed WebTables and Google Fusion Tables. From 1998 to 2005 he was a professor at the University of Washington, where he founded the database group. Dr. Halevy is a founder of two startups, Nimble Technology and Transformic Inc. (acquired by Google in 2005). He co-authored two books: The Infinite Emotions of Coffee and Principles of Data Integration. In 2021 he received the Edgar F. Codd SIGMOD Innovations Award. Dr. Halevy is a Fellow of the ACM and a recipient of the PECASE award and Sloan Fellowship. Together with his co-authors, he received VLDB 10-year best paper awards for the 2008 paper on WebTables and for the 1996 paper on the Information Manifold Data Integration System.

For Attendees' Attention

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