CHRISTOPHER OLSTON
Assistant Professor, Computer Science
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The aim of my research is to make it easier for people to publish and locate useful information on a global scale. At present, my specific research activities pertain to:

• Monitoring autonomous information sources. I study situations in which one wishes to monitor one or more distributed information sources, but resource constraints place limitations on the overall rate at which monitoring can be done. My work to date in this area focuses on monitoring to support centralized search and archival.
• Underspecified queries. Queries to information spaces (Web collections, databases, etc.) are often underspecified representations of an underlying search task that is difficult to translate into an effective query. Underspecified queries are generally supplemented by manual navigation. Yet most research on search systems focuses uniquely on querying. I consider the combination of querying and navigation as the unit of interest, in which queries merely identify starting points for navigation, and navigation is guided by information provided in the query.
• Outsourcing of data management functions. Most organizations are forced to deal with a large amount of important data, yet they do not wish to supply the necessary resources (equipment and personnel) directly. Hence it is desirable to outsource data management functions to a third party. The main stumbling block is the risk of decreased privacy and security. My research aims to find a "sweet spot" between data management outsourcing and security/privacy.