PhD Student Paea LePendu Receives Prestigious Award
Ph.D. student Paea LePendu was recently awarded a prestigious National Physical Science Consortium (NPSC) Graduate Research Fellowship award. The award provides funding of up to $200,000 over six years. (Visit NPSC website for more information on this fellowship.)
The highly competitive NPSC Fellowship matches industrial and research laboratories with educational institutions to sponsor outstanding doctoral students. The National Security Agency (NSA) selected Paea as their top choice among all applicants in Computer Science. Paea is looking forward to this opportunity to continue his research as well as to participate in summer internships at NSA headquarters in the Washington D.C.area.
Paea is currently working with Professor Dejing Dou's research group in the Advanced Integration and Mining Lab. Paea's research focuses on Ontology-based Data Integration and Modeling, an applied research area related to the fields of database and artificial intelligence. In his fellowship application, Paea illustrated the focus of his work in the form of a very simple query which could be easily answered by a human with Internet access: "How many copies of Oprah's favorite book have been sold on Amazon?" Most likely, the answer will come from the information provided in multiple Web pages. For a computer to answer the same query requires significant advances in the representation, understanding and integration of data across multiple sources. Paea explains why "representation and reasoning techniques used in traditional knowledge engineering and the emerging Semantic Web can play a fundamental role in information integration." Paea was instrumental in building OntoGrate, an ontology-based information integration system. OntoGrate represents a first step towards the integration of heterogeneous relational databases and Semantic Web resources.
Paea received a B.S. in Mathematics from Whitman College in 1996. He began his graduate career at the University of Oregon working with the Zebra Fish (ZFIN) database group in 2004. He began working with Professor Dou in 2005 and has co- authored three publications since that time. This past year, Paea traveled to Cyprus and to France to present their work. For more information about Paea's research and to learn how to pronounce his name, please visit Paea LePendu's homepage.
Congratulations, Paea!