Colloquium Computer Science - Mehmet Aktas, Yıldız Technical University, Istanbul

Title: Data Provenance Capture and Visualization in Unmanaged Workflows

Abstract:

Data provenance has led to a developing need for technologies to empower end users to assess and take action on the data life cycle. In the Big Data era, the amount of data generated by scientific workflows increases every day. As the size and volume of data increase, metadata on the data origin and life-cycle of data also overgrow. Thus, this requires innovations that can provide a better understanding and interpretation of data using data provenance. In this talk, I will present the challenges of extracting data provenance in the form of graphs from scientific workflow log files and facilitating demanded visualization approaches such as graph comparison, summarization, backward-forward querying, and stream data visualization.

Short Bio:

Mehmet Aktas is an Associate Professor in the Computer Engineering Department at Yildiz Technical University since 2013. Professor Aktas received his Ph.D. and Master’s degrees in Computer Science from the School of Informatics and Computing at Indiana University and the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department at Syracuse University, respectively. During his graduate education, Prof. Aktas worked in the Decision Applications Division at Los Alamos National Laboratory doing research on service-oriented based computing for e-science simulations. He also worked with NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory focusing on workflow-style grid applications for building an earth science framework for modeling and understanding earthquake and tectonic processes. Aktas completed his post-doc in the Data to Insight Center (D2I) at Indiana University. He contributed to D2I’s work related to data at scale, contributing to projects that help scientists better understand the complex environments and circumstances under which scientific experiments are performed to assist with reproducibility. He has published over 180 peer-reviewed papers in prestigious conferences and journals. Prof. Aktas has research interests in long-term preservation and access to scientific data, large-scale data management, and big data processing in cloud computing platforms.