Michael Benedikt -- Projects

Current Projects

• Delta-X which provides integrity-constraint management for programs updating object- and XML-based data.
• Spruce , a data cleaning system.
• XTrek a system for updating XML, and an application of the system to network management.
• XSQLP a platform for specifying, optimizing, and evaluating XML subtree queries.

Selected Bell Labs Projects from the Past:

• Software automation technology for telecom provisioning :
  I've worked on numerous internal Lucent projects dealing with support for generating technician interfaces to telecom network elements. These include:
  • Auto-Provisioner , a system for generating data management applications from high-level specifications. Auto-Provisioner was used internally at Lucent to generate server-side data interface code for wireless radio network controllers.
• XML tools for secure data transfer :
  The three current projects above are all linked to creating data manipulation tools that give safety guarantees. An older project in this space is:
  • PRATA a system for DTD-directed publishing of XML
  . The work on PRATA is summarized in:
  • "DTD-directed publishing with Attribute Translation Grammars" (with Chee Yong Chan, Wen Fei Fan, Rajeev Rastogi,Shihui Zheng, and Aoying Zhou), in VLDB 2002.
  • "Capturing types and constraints in Data Exchange" (with Chee Yong Chan, Wen Fei Fan, Juliana Freire, and Rajeev Rastogi), in SIGMOD 2003.
  XTREK and XSQLP both rely on static analysis of XML queries. Some theoretical work on this topic can be found in:
  "Satisfiability of XPath in the presence of DTDs" with Wenfei Fan and Floris Geerts, in PODS 2005.
• Support for the Web programming software lifecycle: I've been interested in how to quickly create and maintain web-based services. Two older projects in this area are:
  • VeriWeb a tool for automated testing of web sites.
  • MAWL is a web programming language providing separation of concerns and type safety guarantees.

Additional Research Interests

1. I have done extensive work in finite model theory and databases, particularly with regard to the constraint database model. For a summary of the constraint database work (much of it in collaboration with Leonid Libkin), you might check the Constraint Database Book , by Kuper, Libkin, and Paradaens.
2. Much of my other work in Finite Model Theory and automata theory can be found on my publications page.
3. I have also done work in classical Model Theory, and in the related field of Nonstandard Analysis
4. I have done work in Program Analsysis, Verification,Testing and Formal Methods . Some of this work can be found in the verication section of my publications page.