Homepage Frank Neven

UHasselt Page

Research interests

My general research interests lie within the broad field of data management and data engineering.

Recent research directions include:

• The robustness problem within database concurrency control (PODS 2020, VLDB 2021, ICDT 2022, EDBT 2023, PODS 2023, PODS 2024)
• Data quality (VLDB 2023, ADBIS 2023, ICDE 2024)
• Schema integration in healthcare
• NLP in health (EFSA,EHJ)

Somewhat less recent research directions:

• Reasoning on data partitioning for single-round and multi-round join evaluation in massively parallel systems (PODS 2015, EDBT 2015, ICDT 2016, VLDB 2016, ICDT 2018, PODS 2019, ICDT 2019, ICDT 2020)
• Schema languages for tabular data (WWW 2015, WWW 2018, ICDT 2018)
• Programming the cloud: Calm conjecture (PODS 2011, PODS 2014, ICDT 2015a, ICDT 2015b,ICDT 2015c )

Publications from a distant past that I am the most proud of:

• Succinctness of the Complement and Intersection of Regular Expressions. ACM Trans. Comput. Log. 13(1): 4:1-4:19 (2012)
  • We prove that negation can make a regular expression much more concise: eliminating a single complement operator can cause a double exponential blow-up of its length. This work is featured in the Wikipedia article on regular expressions.
• Inference of concise regular expressions and DTDs. ACM Trans. Database Syst. 35(2): 11:1-11:47 (2010)
  • We were among the first to show that simple regular expressions can be learned from examples in the context of XML schema inference.
• Expressiveness and complexity of XML Schema. ACM Trans. Database Syst. 31(3): 770-813 (2006)
  • This paper sheds light on the effects of the various structural constraints that were imposed by the XML Schema standard.
• Finite state machines for strings over infinite alphabets. ACM Trans. Comput. Log. 5(3): 403-435 (2004).
  • We investigate an automaton model for strings over data values. It instigated a surge of new research. To date this work remains my most cited paper.

Publications

• DBLP
• PubMed
• Google Scholar

Awards

• PODS best paper award:
  • (1998) Frank Neven, Jan Van den Bussche: Expressiveness of Structured Document Query Languages Based on Attribute Grammars. PODS 1998: 11-17
  • (2014) Tom J. Ameloot, Bas Ketsman, Frank Neven, Daniel Zinn: Weaker forms of monotonicity for declarative networking: a more fine-grained answer to the calm-conjecture. PODS 2014: 64-75
  • (2015) Tom J. Ameloot, Gaetano Geck, Bas Ketsman Frank Neven, Thomas Schwentick: Parallel-Correctness and Transferability for Conjunctive Queries. PODS 2015: 47-58
• PODS distinguished paper award:
  • (2023) Brecht Vandevoort, Bas Ketsman, Frank Neven: Allocating Isolation Levels to Transactions in a Multiversion Setting. PODS 2023: 69-78
• SIGMOD research highlights award:
  • (2016) Tom J. Ameloot, Gaetano Geck, Bas Ketsman, Frank Neven, Thomas Schwentick: Data partitioning for single-round multi-join evaluation in massively parallel systems. SIGMOD Rec. 45(1): 33-40 
  • (2023) Brecht Vandevoort, Bas Ketsman, Christoph Koch, Frank Neven: When is it safe to run a transactional workload under Read Committed? SIGMOD Rec. 52(1): 36-43 
  • (2024) Brecht Vandevoort, Bas Ketsman, Frank Neven: Allocation isolation levels to transactions in a multiversion setting.
• ADBIS best paper award:
  • (2023) Niels Bylois, Frank Neven, Stijn Vansummeren Data Ingestion Validation through Stable Conditional Metrics with Ranking and Filtering.ADBIS 2023: 210-223
• ACM Research Highlights:
  • (2017) Tom J. Ameloot, Gaetano Geck,  Bas Ketsman, Frank Neven, Thomas Schwentick: Reasoning on data partitioning for single-round multi-join evaluation in massively parallel systems. Commun. ACM 60(3): 93-100 (2017)
• Best of computing by Computing Reviews:
  • (2014) for the paper Tom J. Ameloot, Bas Ketsman, Frank Neven, Daniel Zinn: Weaker forms of monotonicity for declarative networking: a more fine-grained answer to the calm-conjecture. PODS 2014: 64-75.
• WWW best paper runner-up:
  • (2008) Geert Jan Bex, Wouter Gelade, Frank Neven, Stijn Vansummeren: Learning deterministic regular expressions for the inference of schemas from XML data. WWW 2008: 825-834

Invited Talks

Research

• Remaining CALM in Declarative Networking. ICDT 2014
• Logical Aspects of Massively Parallel and Distributed Systems. PODS 2016 (slides)
• Robustness Against Read Committed: A Free Transactional Lunch. PODS 2022 (slides)

General audience

• Can Computers Code? DojoCon 2024 Namur
• Kunnen computers programmeren? CodeFestival 2023 Brussel
• Het belang van computationeel denken in het onderwijs SETT 2020 Gent