Presentation slide composition is an important job for knowledge workers. Instead of starting from scratch, users tend to make new presentation slides by reusing existing ones. A primary challenge in slide reuse is to select desired materials from a collection of existing slides. The state-of-the-art solution utilizes texts and images in slides as well as file names to help users to retrieve the materials they want. However, it only allows users to choose an entire slide as a query but does not support the search for a single element such as a few keywords, a sentence, an image, or a diagram. In this paper, we investigate content-based search for a variety of elements in presentation slides. Users may freely choose a slide element as a query. We propose different query processing methods to deal with various types of queries and improve the search efficiency. A system with a user-friendly interface is designed, based on which experiments are performed to evaluate the effectiveness and the efficiency of the proposed methods.

Probabilistic range query is an important type of query in the area of uncertain data management. A probabilistic range query returns all the data objects within a specific range from the query object with a probability no less than a given threshold. In this paper, we assume that each uncertain object stored in the database is associated with a multi-dimensional Gaussian distribution, which describes the probability distribution that the object appears in the multi-dimensional space. A query object is either a certain object or an uncertain object modeled by a Gaussian distribution. We propose several filtering techniques and an R-tree-based index to efficiently support probabilistic range queries over Gaussian objects. Extensive experiments on real data demonstrate the efficiency of our proposed approach.

As big data attracts attention in a variety of fields, research on data exploration for analyzing large-scale scientific data has gained popularity. To support exploratory analysis of scientific data, effective summarization and visualization of the target data as well as seamless cooperation with modern data management systems are in demand. In this paper, we focus on the exploration-based analysis of scientific array data, and define a spatial V-Optimal histogram to summarize it based on the notion of histograms in the database research area. We propose histogram construction approaches based on a general hierarchical partitioning as well as a more specific one, the l-grid partitioning, for effective and efficient data visualization in scientific data analysis. In addition, we implement the proposed algorithms on the state-of-the-art array DBMS, which is appropriate to process and manage scientific data. Experiments are conducted using massive evacuation simulation data in tsunami disasters, real taxi data as well as synthetic data, to verify the effectiveness and efficiency of our methods.

Query autocompletion is an important and practical technique when users want to search for desirable information. As mobile devices become more and more popular, one of the main applications is location-aware service, such as Web mapping. In this paper, we propose a new solution to location-aware query autocompletion. We devise a trie-based index structure and integrate spatial information into trie nodes. Our method is able to answer both range and top-k queries. In addition, we discuss the extension of our method to support the error tolerant feature in case user's queries contain typographical errors. Experiments on real datasets show that the proposed method outperforms existing methods in terms of query processing performance.