I'm currently the Director of Computer Science, Almaden, which may just be the most fun job in the computer science research universe. It’s also a huge responsibility, given the history of this place! My official bio is on my official web page.
I am an IBM Distinguished Engineer (there are about 400 of us now, from a technical population of around 170,000), recognized for my work on the federation of data and my part of creating the IBM Life Sciences business back in the early years of this (21st) century.
My technical interests include all aspects of helping people find information. I've mostly worked in the area of distributed information systems, especially information integration. For the last few years, I’ve been leading the technical team for IBM’s WebSphere Information Integration technologies. I learned a lot about the real world doing this. For example, I managed our world-wide development team, learning the importance of quality assurance, schedules, and distributed teamwork. I also worked closely with the business team, learning what to think about when deciding build vs buy, how to read market and financial information and how to map marketing "plays" to actual development line iterms. Other "fun" experiences included helping out on a major acquisition and the resulting merger of two 300+ person world-wide development teams (let alone the product lines!), and participating in the overall IBM Software Group architecture team (believe it or not, we actually do try to make our products work together :) .
But I’m now back to Research. Before I left, I created the Clio project, looking at how to do targeted schema mapping as part of the information integration process. This has led now to a major effort in the theory community, key technologies in a new product for IBM, and a follow on project, MAUI (Metadata Analysis, Understanding and Integration - and a great place to visit).
Previously, I led the Garlic team. Garlic was a distributed, heterogeneous, multimedia information system. It could be thought of as object-oriented middleware. Garlic provided its user with an integrated object-oriented view of data in a set of underlying data stores. Users could query the data, or access it from a C++ API. If the underlying data store provided search capabilities, Garlic made those capabilities available to the user. Papers on Garlic appeared in many major conferences, and the Garlic technology, particularly the wrapper and optimization technology, has been key to several IBM products and offerings. It was the power behind DiscoveryLink, our first offering when we launched the IBM Life Sciences business, and it forms the core of WebSphere Information Integrator, which in turn was the first product in WebSphere Information Integration Solutions.
PESTO was a GUI for browsing, querying, and generally exploring an object-oriented database system. It started out as a front-end to Garlic, but was also used on top of an OO-SQL query engine, which ran on ObjectStore and on persistent SOM data. PESTO was demonstrated at ObjectWorld and at SIGMOD '96 (postscript ~50k) in Montreal.
Past projects include R*, a distributed relational database, and Starburst, an extensible, object-relational database. A lot of the technology from Starburst is now available in DB2 for Linux, Unix and Windows. Some technology from R* was used in DRDA, and some is relevant to Garlic, too. I received my PhD from the University of Texas at Austin, and my AB from Harvard. I joined IBM in 1981, and have been here ever since, except for a brief sabbatical at the University of Wisconsin in 1992-3, when I worked on modeling join costs, among other things.
Laura Haas
IBM Almaden Research Center
650 Harry Rd.
San Jose, Calif. 95120-6099
USA
External 1-408-927-1700
Fax 1-408-927-2100
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