Richard (Rick) Hull

Richard (Rick) Hull is an ACM Fellow and a Bell Labs Fellow. He has recently moved to IBM Research, at the T.J. Watson Research Center (in Yorktown Heights and Hawthorne, NY). His web page there will be available soon.

Until late May, 2008, Rick served as the Director of the Computing and Software Principles Research Department at Bell Laboratories, the research division of Alcatel-Lucent (which was created as the merger of Alcatel and Lucent Technologies on December 1, 2006). This department was a combination of the former Network Data and Services Research Department, the former Computing Systems Research Department, and some additional groups (a new web page for the department will be made "soon"). The content below was created before May, 2008.

Hull received B.A. degrees in Mathematics and Philosophy from the University of California, Santa Barbara, and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Mathematics from the University of California, Berkeley. He served on the faculty of Computer Science at the University of Southern California from 1980 until 1994. From 1993 to 1996 he was a visitor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Also, he has been a frequent visitor to the Verso Group at INRIA, near Paris, France. Prior to joining Bell Labs, his research was supported in part by grants from NSF, ARPA, AT&T, and U S WEST. Some of his current research is also supported in part through NSF grants.

Hull works in areas related to the convergence of data and services, including research on e-services, workflow, policy management, personalization, data integration, telecom applications, languages, and theory. He is co-author of the book Foundations of Databases (Addison-Wesley, 1995), and is (co-)author of over 95 refereed journal, conference, and workshop articles. .

Further information is available on the following topics:

• K. Bhattacharya, C. Gerede, R. Hull, R. Liu, and J. Su. "Towards Formal Analysis of Artifact-Centric Business Process Models". (abstract, pdf, bibtex). Proc. of Business Process Management, 5th Intl. Conf. (BPM 2007), Brisbane, Australia, September 24-28, 2007, pp. 288-304. (Best paper award).

• Tutorials and invited talks on web services circa 2003-2005:
  • Web Services Composition: A Story of Models, Automata, and Logics (ppt), an invited keynote talk by Richard Hull, 7/13/2005, at the IEEE Intl. Conf. on Web Services (ICWS) and IEEE Intl. Conf. on Service Computing (SCC) in Orlando, Florida.

  • Tools for Design of Composite Web Services (ppt)), SIGMOD 2004 tutorial by Richard Hull and Jianwen Su.

  • Web Services Composition: A Story of Models, Automata, and Logics (pdf), a tutorial for the 2004 EDBT Summer School in Sardinia, by Richard Hull. (Different than IEEE ICWS/SCC keynote talk of 7/13/2005 listed above.)

  • E-Services: A Look Behind the Curtain (PODS 2003 Keynote Talk) (abstract, pdf, final version of talk, in ppt), Richard Hull, Michael Benedikt, Vassilis Christophides, and Jianwen Su. Appears in ACM Symp. on Principles of Database Systems (PODS), June, 2003.

  • E-Service Composition: Models and Formalisms (Invited Talk at the Description Logics Workshop, 9/03, in Rome) ( ppt), by Richard Hull. (Based largely on the PODS 2003 talk, but incorporating various work from the Description Logic community.)

• D. Berardi, D. Calvanese, G. De Giacomo, R. Hull, M. Marcella, "Automatic Composition of Trasition-based Semantic Web Services with Messaging" (pdf), VLDB 2005, Trondheim, Sept., 2005 (to appear); Online appendix available as Tech. Report 06-2005, Universita di Roma "La Sapienza" (pdf).

• R. Hull and J. Su, "Tools for Composite Web Services: A Short Overview", ACM SIGMOD Record, Vol 34, No. 2, June, 2005. (pdf).

• Semantic Web Services Framework home page; see in particular the Semantic Web Services Ontology (SWSO), Version 1.0 (a document that is still evolving).

• Listing in DBLP of Hull's publications.

• E-services Customization -- tools to let end-users individualize/customize e-services (including web services and telecom services) that they interact with. Includes the GUPster proposal on profile data management and the Houdini proposal for policy-enabling e-services to support end-user preferences.

  The Houdini rules engine (also known as "Vortex") now provides the kernel of the Policy Management Service Creation Server (SCS) of Lucent's MiLife Intelligent Services Gateway (ISG), a Parlay/OSA gateway that makes telecom data and services available to internet and web-based applications. It is also being incorporated into the MiLife Application Server, a next generation converged services platform that provides an open interfaces, programmability and media independence.

• E-services Composition -- a study of e-services, including global properties of composite e-services, and the interaction of different kinds of e-services (web services, telecom services, ...)

• Vortex project -- new paradigms for specification and execution of decision-making activities, including in particular, workflows. The original Vortex was created especially for Customer Relationship Management (CRM) applications. Vortex provides the rules engine that drives the Lucent product Contact Assist, which can enhance the effectiveness of web storefronts. (The original Vortex project also provided a foundation for the Houdini project on policy management for telecom services -- see above.)

• Other research activities in the Network Data and Services Research Department at Bell Labs

• Press release from early 2003 about our work on simplifying privacy controls for sharing cell phone locations, a short article on the Lucent web site.

• Heraclitus project -- explicit manipulation of deltas between database states

• Selected recent publications

• Foundations of Databases, by S. Abiteboul, R. Hull and V. Vianu. Addison-Wesley, 1995

• Invited tutorial for PODS 97 -- "Managing Semantic Heterogeneity in Databases : A Theoretical Perspective"

Last updated (briefly) 05/27/08

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