My research is on data management. These days I would characterize it as data engineering aspects of data science. The main focus of my research follows two threads: (1) application of database technology to non-traditional data types, and (2) distributed & parallel data management. These two threads usually converge.

Investigating how database technology can be applied to data types that are more complex than business data processing (for which relational systems are the perfect fit) has always been one of my interests. Frank Tompa characterizes this type of work as Data Management(X) where X is the data type of interest -- we also have a graduate course with exactly this focus (CS 741). At different times in my career, X has been equal to one or more of the following: "object" data (in the sense of object databases), multimedia data, temporal data, spatial data, XML, stream data. Currently, my focus is on graph data and RDF data.