José Luis Ambite

Project Leader

Information Sciences Institute

University of Southern California

4676 Admiralty Way, Suite 1001

Marina del Rey, CA 90292

Email:

Phone: +1-310-448-8472

Fax: +1-310-822-0751

Senior Research Scientist

Digital Government Research Center

University of Southern California

Research Assistant Professor

Computer Science Department

University of Southern California

Research

I'm a member of the USC/ISI Information Integration Research Group and the USC Computer Science Database Group.

Current Projects

• NIH-NHGRI Population Architecture using Genomics and Epidemiology (PAGE) Coordinating Center.
  The Coordinating Center provides data integration and grid computing infrastructure for the investigation, in well-characterized population studies, of genetic variants identified as potentially causally associated with complex diseases in genome-wide association and other genetic studies.
• NIH-NIMH Center for Genomic Studies of Mental Disorders.
  We provide data integration and grid computing infrastructure to support the NIMH Center for Collaborative Genetic Studies of Mental Disorders, which is investigating the inherited (genetic), environmental and physiologic causes of mental disorders, such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, depression, and autism.
• NIH-NCRR Biomedical Informatics Research Network (BIRN)
  The major goal of this project is to develop a federated and distributed infrastructure for the storage, retrieval, analysis, and documentation of biomedical data for the NCRR Biomedical Informatics Research Network.
• Southern California Clinical and Translational Science Institute (SC-CTSI) Center for Biomedical Informatics Sciences (CBIS). CBIS's Vision is to create a shared, common informatics infrastructure to serve as the cornerstone for information acquisition, management, integration, and analysis of needs across the CTSI.

Past Projects

• Argos focused on automatic web service composition, applied to a transportation planning domain.
• The Center for Health Informatics aimed to provide a secure, seamless, global computing platform for creating and exchanging health information between the public, private and academic sectors.
• EntityBases developed techniques to extract, link, and integrate massive amounts of data from numerous heterogeneous sources.
• CALO (Cognitive Assistant that Learns and Organizes): facilitating information integration by learning source models.
• Heracles is an interactive data-driven constraint-based hierarchical planner.
• SIMS and Ariadne are mediator architectures that integrate information from distributed and heterogeneous data sources.
• The DGRC Energy Data Collection (EDC) project integrates information from government databases and extends the integration framework of SIMS by leveraging large ontologies such as SENSUS (now OMEGA ) and natural language processing techniques.
• Proteus focuses on web service composition and execution.

Courses

• Spring 2011: CS 548, Information Integration on the Web
  Instructors: Kristina Lerman, José Luis Ambite
• ICAPS 2004 Tutorial on Planning on the Web
  Whistler, British Columbia, Canada, 3 June 2004
  Craig Knoblock and José Luis Ambite
• Fall 2003: CS 541, Artificial Intelligence Planning
  Instructors: Jim Blythe, José Luis Ambite and Yolanda Gil.

Workshops

• The 4th International Workshop on AI for Service Composition
  in conjunction with The 17th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI 2006)
  Riva del Garda, Trento, Italy, 28 August 2006
  Organizing Committee: José Luis Ambite, Jim Blythe, Jana Koehler, Sheila McIlraith, Marco Pistore, Biplav Srivastava.
• AAAI 2005 Workshop on Exploring Planning and Scheduling for Web Services, Grid and Autonomic Computing
  Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 9-10 July 2005
  Organizing Committee: Biplav Srivastava (co-chair), Jim Blythe (co-chair), José Luis Ambite, Yun-Heh (Jessica) Chen-Burger, Subbarao Kambhampati, Sheila McIlraith, Paolo Traverso.
• ICAPS 2004 Workshop on Planning and Scheduling for Web and Grid Services
  Whistler, British Columbia, Canada, 4 June 2004
  Organizing Committee: Jim Blythe (co-chair), José Luis Ambite (co-chair), Derek Long, Drew McDermott, Sheila McIlraith, Biplav Srivastava, and Paolo Traverso.
• ICAPS 2003 Workshop on Planning for Web Services
  Trento, Italy, 10 June 2003
  Organizing Committee: José Luis Ambite, Craig Knoblock, Sheila McIlraith,
  Mike P. Papazoglou, Biplav Srivastava, and Paolo Traverso.

Publications

• Scalable Query Rewriting: A Graph-Based Approach.
  George Konstantinidis and José Luis Ambite.
  Proceedings of the ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of Data (SIGMOD 2011), Athens, Greece, 2011.
• Learning phenotype mapping for integrating large genetic data.
  Chun-Nan Hsu, Cheng-Ju Kuo, Congxing Cai, Sarah A. Pendergrass, Marylyn D. Ritchie, and José Luis Ambite.
  Proceedings of BioNLP 2011 Workshop (BioNLP '11). Association for Computational Linguistics, Stroudsburg, PA, USA, 2011.
• The Next PAGE in Understanding Complex Traits: Design for the Analysis of Population Architecture Using Genetics and Epidemiology (PAGE) Study.
  Tara C. Matise, José Luis Ambite, Steven Buyske, Steven, Chris S. Carlson, Shelley A. Cole, Dana C. Crawford, Chris A. Haiman, Gerardo Heiss, Charles Kooperberg, Loic Le Marchand, Teri A. Manolio, Kari E. North, Ulrike Peters, Marylyn D. Ritchie, Lucia A. Hindorff, Jonathan L. Haines, for the PAGE Study
  American Journal of Epidemiology 174 (7): 849-859, 2011.
  doi: 10.1093/aje/kwr160
• Enabling collaborative research using the Biomedical Informatics Research Network (BIRN).
  Karl G Helmer, Jose Luis Ambite, Joseph Ames, Rachana Ananthakrishnan, Gully Burns, Ann L Chervenak, Ian Foster, Lee Liming, David Keator, Fabio Macciardi, Ravi Madduri, John-Paul Navarro, Steven Potkin, Bruce Rosen, Seth Ruffins, Robert Schuler, Jessica A Turner, Arthur Toga, Christina Williams, Carl Kesselman, for the Biomedical Informatics Research Network
  Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association JAMIA 2011;18:416-422, 2011.
  doi:10.1136/amiajnl-2010-000032
• Neuroscience data integration through mediation: an (F)BIRN case study.
  Naveen Ashish, José Luis Ambite, Maria Muslea and Jessica A. Turner.
  Frontiers in Neuroinformatics 4:118, 2010. doi: 10.3389/fninf.2010.00118
• Linking and Building Ontologies of Linked Data.
  Rahul Parundekar, Craig A. Knoblock and José Luis Ambite.
  Proceedings of the 9th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC 2010), Shanghai, China, 2010.
• Automatically constructing semantic web services from online sources
  José Luis Ambite, Sirish Darbha, Aman Goel,Craig A. Knoblock, Kristina Lerman, Rahul Parundekar, and Thomas Russ.
  Proceedings of the 8th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC 2009), Washington, D.C., 2009.
• Interactive data integration through smart copy & paste.
  Zachary G. Ives, Craig A. Knoblock, Steven Minton, Marie Jacob, Partha Pratim Talukdar, Rattapoom Tuchinda, Jose Luis Ambite, Maria Muslea, and Cenk Gazen.
  Fourth Biennial Conference on Innovative Data Systems Research (CIDR), Pacific Grove, CA, January 2009.
• Discovering and learning semantic models of online sources for information integration.
  José Luis Ambite, Bora Gazen, Craig A. Knoblock, Kristina Lerman, and Thomas Russ
  Proceedings of the IJCAI Workshop on Information Integration on the Web, Pasadena, CA, 2009.
• Exploiting data semantics to discover, extract, and model web sources.
  Jose Luis Ambite, Craig A. Knoblock, Kristina Lerman, Anon Plangprasopchok, Thomas Russ, Cenk Gazen, Steven Minton, and Mark Carman.
  Proceedings of the First International Workshop on Semantic Aspects in Data Mining (SADM'08), 2008.
• Beyond the Elves: Making Intelligent Agents Intelligent
  Craig A. Knoblock, José Luis Ambite, Mark Carman,Matthew Michelson, Pedro Szekely and Rattapoom Tuchinda.
  AI Magazine, 29(2). Summer 2008.
• Automatically Composing Data Workflows with Relational Descriptions and Shim Services
  José Luis Ambite and Dipsy Kapoor.
  Proceedings of the 6th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC-2007), Busan, Korea, November 2007.
• Quality-Driven Geospatial Data Integration
  Snehal Thakkar, Craig A. Knoblock and José Luis Ambite.
  Proceedings of the 15th ACM International Symposium on Advances in Geographic Information Systems (ACM GIS 2007), Seattle, WA, November 2007.
• EntityBases: Compiling, organizing and querying massive entity repositories.
  Craig A. Knoblock, José Luis Ambite, Kavita Ganesan, Maria Muslea, Steven Minton, Greg Barish, Evan Gamble, Claude Nanjo, Kane See, Cyrus Shahabi, , and Ching-Chien Chen.
  Proceedings of the International Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ICAI'07), Las Vegas, Nevada, USA, June 2007.
  
• Automatic Generation of Data Processing Workflows for Transportation Modeling
  José Luis Ambite and Dipsy Kapoor.
  Proceedings of the 8th Annual International Conference on Digital Government Research (dg.o2007), Philadelphia, PA, May 2007. Best Paper Award
  
• Argos: A Framework for Automatically Generating Data Processing Workflows
  José Luis Ambite and Dipsy Kapoor.
  Proceedings of the 8th Annual National Conference on Digital Government Research (dg.o2007), Philadelphia, PA, May 2007.
• ARGOS: Dynamic Composition of Web Services for Goods Movement Analysis and Planning (Project Highlights 2007)
  José Luis Ambite, Genevieve Giuliano and Peter Gordon.
  Proceedings of the 8th Annual National Conference on Digital Government Research (dg.o2007), Philadelphia, PA, May 2007.
• Data Processing Workflows in the Social Sciences: Representation and Automatic Generation (Abstract)
  José Luis Ambite, Dipsy Kapoor, and Mountu Jinwala.
  Proceedings of the 7th Annual National Conference on Digital Government Research (dg.o2006), San Diego, California, May 2006.
• Design and implementation of the CALO query manager
  José Luis Ambite, Vinay K. Chaudhri, Richard Fikes, Jessica Jenkins, Sunil Mishra, Maria Muslea, Tomas Uribe, and Guizhen Yang.
  Proceedings of the 18th Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence (IAAI-2006), Boston, Massachusetts, July 2006.
• Composing, optimizing, and executing plans for bioinformatics web services
  Snehal Thakkar, José Luis Ambite, and Craig A. Knoblock.
  The VLDB Journal, 14(3): 330-353, 2005.
• Conditional constraint networks for interleaved planning and information gathering
  José Luis Ambite, Craig A. Knoblock, Maria Muslea, and Steve Minton.
  IEEE Intelligent Systems, 20(2), March/April 2005.
  A slightly longer version is here.
• Automatic Composition of Aggregation Workflows for Transportation Modeling
  José Luis Ambite and Matthew Weathers.
  Proceedings of the 6th Annual National Conference on Digital Government Research (dg.o2005), Atlanta, Georgia, May 2005.
• Retrieving and Semantically Integrating Heterogeneous Data from the Web
  Martin Michalowski, José Luis Ambite, Craig A. Knoblock, Steve Minton, Snehal Thakkar, and Rattapoom Tuchinda
  IEEE Intelligent Systems., Vol. 19, No. 3, 2004, pp. 72-79.
• Plan Optimization by Plan Rewriting
  José Luis Ambite, Craig A. Knoblock and Steve Minton
  In Intelligent Techniques for Planning., Ioannis Vlahavas and Dimitris Vrakas Eds., Idea Group Publishing, Hershey, PA, 2005.
  This paper combines and summarizes the JAIR 2001 and ICAPS 2000 papers below. A draft of the book chapter is here
• A Data Integration Approach to Automatically Composing and Optimizing Web Services
  Snehal Thakkar, José Luis Ambite and Craig A. Knoblock
  In Proceeding of 2004 ICAPS Workshop on Planning and Scheduling for Web and Grid Services , June 2004.
• Argos: Dynamic Composition of Web Services for Goods Movement Analysis and Planning
  José Luis Ambite, Genevieve Giuliano, Peter Gordon, Andreas Harth, Karanbir Jassar, Qisheng Pan and LanLan Wang
  Project Highlight at the National Conference on Digital Government Research (dg.o 2004), Seattle, Washington, May 2004.
• Argos: An Ontology and Web Service Composition Infrastructure for Goods Movement Analysis
  José Luis Ambite, Genevieve Giuliano, Peter Gordon, Andreas Harth, Karanbir Jassar, Qisheng Pan and LanLan Wang
  System Demosntration at the National Conference on Digital Government Research (dg.o 2004), Seattle, Washington, May 2004.
• A View Integration Approach to Dynamic Composition of Web Services
  Snehal Thakkar, Craig Knoblock and José Luis Ambite
  Workshop on Planning for Web Services, The 13th International Conference on Automated Planning & Scheduling (ICAPS 2003), Trento, Italy, 2003.
• Proteus: A System for Dynamically Composing and Intelligently Executing Web Services
  Shahram Ghandeharizadeh, Craig A. Knoblock, Christos Papadopoulos, Cyrus Shahabi, Esam Alwagait, José Luis Ambite, Min Cai, Ching-Chien Chen, Parikshit Pol, Rolfe Schmidt, Saihong Song, Snehal Thakkar, and Runfang Zhou.
  In Proceedings of the First International Conference on Web Services (ICWS), Las Vegas, Nevada, June 2003.
• Getting from Here to There: Interactive Planning and Agent Execution for Optimizing Travel (ps.gz) (slides)
  José Luis Ambite, Greg Barish, Craig A. Knoblock, Maria Muslea, Jean Oh, and Steven Minton
  The Fourteenth Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence Conference (IAAI), Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, 2002.
• Data integration and access: The Digital Government Research Center's Energy Data Collection (EDC) project.
  José Luis Ambite, Yigal Arens, Walter Bourne, Steve Feiner, Luis Gravano, Vasileios Hatzivassiloglou, Eduard Hovy, Judith Klavans, Andrew Philpot, Usha Ramachandran, Kenneth Ross, Jay Sandhaus, Deniz Sarioz, Rolfe R. Schmidt, Cyrus Shahabi, Anurag Singla, Surabhan Temiyabutr, and Brian Whitman.
  In Advances in Digital Government: Technology, Human Factors, and Policy. William J.McIver and Ahmed K.Elmagarmid, Eds., Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2002.
• Dynamically Composing Web Services from On-line Sources
  Snehal Thakkar, Craig A. Knoblock, José Luis Ambite, and Cyrus Shahabi
  Workshop on Intelligent Service Integration, The Eighteenth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, 2002.
• Integrating Heterogeneous Sources for Better Freight Flow Analysis and Planning
  José Luis Ambite, Genevieve Giuliano, Peter Gordon, Qisheng Pan, and Sandipan Bharracharjee
  Second National Conference on Digital Government Research (dg.o 2002), Redondo Beach, California, May 2002.
  A longer version of this paper was presented at the Transportation Research Board 82nd Annual Meeting, Washington, D.C., January 2003
• DGRC AskCal: Natural Language Question Answering for Energy Time Series
  Andrew Philpot, José Luis Ambite, and Eduard Hovy
  Second National Conference on Digital Government Research (dg.o 2002), Redondo Beach, California, May 2002.
• A Portal for Access to Complex Distributed Information about Energy
  José Luis Ambite, Yigal Arens, Walter Bourne, Peter T. Davis, Steven Feiner, Eduard H. Hovy, Judith L. Klavans, Andrew Philpot, Samuel Popper, Ken Ross, Ju-Ling Shih, Peter Sommer, Surabhan (Nick) Temiyabutr, and Laura Zadoff
  Second National Conference on Digital Government Research (dg.o 2002), Redondo Beach, California, May 2002.
• Planning by Rewriting (HTML) (ps.Z)
  José Luis Ambite and Craig A. Knoblock
  Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, 15, pp 207-261, 2001.
• Mixed-Initiative, Multi-source Information Assistants (HTML) (ps.gz)
  Craig A. Knoblock, Steve Minton, José Luis Ambite, Maria Muslea, Jean Oh, and Martin Frank
  The Tenth International World Wide Web Conference (WWW10), Hong Kong, 2001.
• Efficiently Querying Moving Objects with Pre-defined Paths in a Distributed Environment
  Cyrus Shahabi, Mohammad R. Kolahdouzan, Snehal Thakkar, José Luis Ambite, and Craig A. Knoblock.
  The Ninth ACM International Symposium on Advances in Geographic Information Systems (ACM-GIS), Atlanta, Georgia, U.S.A., November 2001.
• The WorldInfo Assistant: Spatio-Temporal Information Integration on the Web
  José Luis Ambite, Craig A. Knoblock, Mohammad R. Kolahdouzan, Maria Muslea, Cyrus Shahabi and Snehal Thakkar
  Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Very Large Data Bases (System Demonstration), Rome, Italy, September 2001.
• Fast Approximate Evaluation of OLAP Queries for Integrated Statistical Data
  José Luis Ambite, Cyrus Shahabi, Rolfe R. Schmidt, and Andrew Philpot.
  Proceedings of the First National Conference on Digital Government Research (dg.o 2001), Redondo Beach, May 2001.
• Data Acquisition and Integration in the DGRC's Energy Data Collection Project
  Eduard Hovy, Andrew Philpot, José Luis Ambite, Yigal Arens, Judith Klavans, Walter Bourne, and Deniz Saroz.
  Proceedings of the First National Conference on Digital Government Research (dg.o 2001), Redondo Beach, May 2001.
• Simplifying Data Access: The Energy Data Collection Project
  José Luis Ambite, Yigal Arens, Eduard Hovy, Andrew Philpot, Luis Gravano, Vasileios Hatzivassiloglou, and Judith Klavans.
  IEEE Computer 34 (2), Special Issue on Digital Government, February 2001.
• Integrating the World: The WorldInfo Assistant
  Craig A. Knoblock, José Luis Ambite, Steven Minton, Cyrus Shahabi, Mohammad Kolahdouzan, Maria Muslea, Jean Oh, and Snehal Thakkar.
  International Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IC-AI), Las Vegas, 2001.
• Compiling Source Descriptions for Efficient and Flexible Information Integration
  José Luis Ambite, Craig A. Knoblock, Ion Muslea, and Andrew Philpot.
  Journal of Intelligent Information Systems, 16(2):149-187, 2001.
• The Ariadne Approach to Web-based Information Integration ,
  Craig A. Knoblock, Steven Minton, José Luis Ambite, Naveen Ashish, Ion Muslea, Andrew G. Philpot, and Sheila Tejada.
  International the Journal on Cooperative Information Systems (IJCIS) 10 (1-2) Special Issue on Intelligent Information Agents: Theory and Applications, pp 145-169, 2001.
• Flexible and Scalable Cost-Based Query Planning in Mediators: A Transformational Approach (ps)
  José Luis Ambite, Craig A. Knoblock.
  Artificial Intelligence Journal, 118 (1-2), pp 115-161, April 2000.
• Learning Plan Rewriting Rules (ps)
  José Luis Ambite, Craig A. Knoblock, and Steven Minton.
  Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Artificial Intelligence Planning and Scheduling Systems, Breckenridge, Colorado, 2000.
• Planning by Rewriting (ps.gz)
  José Luis Ambite
  Ph.D. Thesis. University of Southern California, 1998.
• Modeling Web Sources for Information Integration , (ps)
  Craig A. Knoblock, Steven Minton, José Luis Ambite, Naveen Ashish, Pragnesh Jay Modi, Ion Muslea, Andrew G. Philpot, and Sheila Tejada.
  Proceedings of the Fifteenth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Madison, Wisconsin, 1998.
• Flexible and scalable query planning in distributed and heterogeneous environments (ps)
  José Luis Ambite and Craig A. Knoblock.
  Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Artificial Intelligence Planning Systems, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 1998.
• ARIADNE: A System for Constructing Mediators for Internet Sources
  José Luis Ambite, Naveen Ashish, Craig A. Knoblock, Steven Minton, Pragnesh J. Modi, Ion Muslea, Andrew Philpot, and Sheila Tejada.
  Proceedings of the ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of Data (System Demonstration), Seattle, Washington, 1998
• Planning by rewriting: Efficiently generating high-quality plans , (ps)
  José Luis Ambite and Craig A. Knoblock.
  Proceedings of the Fourteenth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Providence, Rhode Island, 1997.
• Agents for Information Gathering (ps)
  Craig A. Knoblock and José Luis Ambite.
  In Software Agents, J. Bradshaw ed., AAAI/MIT Press, Menlo Park, California, 1997.
• Agents for Information Gathering
  José Luis Ambite and Craig A. Knoblock.
  IEEE Expert: Intelligent Systems and their applications. September/October 1997.
• Flexible and Scalable Query Access Planning using an AI Planner (ps)
  José Luis Ambite and Craig A. Knoblock.
  Proceedings of the IEEE Knowledge and Data Engineering Exchange Workshop , Newport Beach, California, 1997.
• SIMS Manual (ps)
  José Luis Ambite, Yigal Arens, Naveen Ashish, Chin Y. Chee, Chun-Nan Hsu, Craig A. Knoblock Wei-Min Shen, and Sheila Tejada.
  University of Southern California, Information Sciences Institute, December 1997.
• Efficient Planning by Graph Rewriting (ps)
  José Luis Ambite and Craig A. Knoblock.
  Student Abstract in Proceedings of the Thirteenth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Portland, Oregon, 1996.
• Reconciling Distributed Information Sources (ps)
  José Luis Ambite and Craig A. Knoblock.
  Working Notes of the AAAI Spring Symposium on Information Gathering in Distributed Heterogeneous Environments, Palo Alto, California, 1995.
• Reconciling Agents Models
  José Luis Ambite and Craig Knoblock.
  Workshop on Intelligent Information Agents of the Third International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (IIA-CIKM'94), NIST, Gaithersburg, Maryland, November, 1994.