CURRICULUM VITAE

(May 20, 2003)

Biographical Sketch





Personal Data

Name: Peter Theodore WOOD
Date of Birth: 8 July 1957
Citizenship: South African
Residence: Permanent right of abode in the UK
Marital Status: Married, two children


Work Address

School of Computer Science & Information Systems
Birkbeck College, University of London
Malet Street, London WC1E 7HX
(tel) 020-7631-6792
(fax) 020-7631-6727
(e-mail) ptw@dcs.bbk.ac.uk

Tertiary Education

1984-1988 University of Toronto, Canada
1981-1982 University of Cape Town, South Africa
1975-1978 University of Cape Town, South Africa

Degrees

Ph.D. University of Toronto (March 1989); thesis title: `` Queries on Graphs''
  Supervisor: Alberto Mendelzon; External Examiner: Mihalis Yannakakis (Bell Labs)
M.Sc. (Cum Laude) University of Cape Town (December 1982)
B.Sc. (Hons) University of Cape Town (December 1978)
B.Sc. University of Cape Town (December 1977)

Employment History

2001- Senior Lecturer, School of Computer Science & Information Systems, Birkbeck College
1998-2000 Lecturer, Department of Computer Science, King's College London
1989-1997 Associate Professor, Department of Computer Science, University of Cape Town
1983-1984 Senior Research Officer, Institute for Applied Computer Science, University of Stellenbosch
1981-1982 Analyst/Programmer (part-time), Microcom (Pty) Ltd., Cape Town

Research

My principal area of interest and research is database systems, with particular emphasis on query languages and query optimisation. This research has been applied to relational, deductive and object-oriented databases, as well as more recently to the World Wide Web. Related areas of interest include logic programming and data visualisation.

Graphs provide a unifying framework for much of my research. On the one hand, I have proposed that graphs be used explicitly as a representation for data and queries in visual querying and visualisation of data; on the other, I have used graphs as a tool to determine the efficiency of query evaluation algorithms and to establish the correctness of optimisation techniques for deductive databases.

Publications1

Refereed Papers
1.
  P.T. Wood, ``Containment for XPath Fragments under DTD Constraints,'' in Proc. 9th Int. Conf. on Database Theory (ICDT) (Siena, Italy, Jan. 8-10), LNCS 2572, Springer-Verlag, 2003, pp. 300-314.
2.
  J. Bailey, A. Poulovassilis and P.T. Wood, ``Analysis and Optimisation of Event-Condition-Action Rules on XML,'' Computer Networks, 39, 3 (21 June 2002), 239-259.
3.
  J. Bailey, A. Poulovassilis and P.T. Wood, ``An Event-Condition-Action Language for XML,'' in Proc. Eleventh Int. World Wide Web Conf. (WWW2002) (Honolulu, Hawaii, May 7-11), 2002, pp. 486-495.
4.
  M. Levene and P.T. Wood, ``XML Structure Compression,'' in Proc. Second Int. Workshop on Web Dynamics (Honolulu, Hawaii, May 7), 2002.
5.
  P.T. Wood, ``Minimising Simple XPath Expressions,'' in Proc. 4th Int. Workshop on the Web and Databases (WebDB) (Santa Barbara, California, May 24-25), 2001, pp. 13-18.
6.
  P.T. Wood, ``On the Equivalence of XML Patterns,'' in Proc. 1st Int. Conf. on Computational Logic (Imperial College, UK, July 24-28), LNAI 1861, Springer-Verlag, 2000, pp. 1152-1166.
7.
  P.T. Wood, ``Rewriting XQL Queries on XML Repositories,'' in Proc. 17th British National Conf. on Databases (Univ. of Exeter, UK, July 3-5), LNCS 1832, Springer-Verlag, 2000, pp. 209-226.
8.
  Z.P. Nedev and P.T. Wood, ``A Polynomial-Time Algorithm for Finding Regular Simple Paths in Outerplanar Graphs,'' Journal of Algorithms, 35 (May 2000), 235-259.
9.
  P.T. Wood, ``Optimizing Web Queries Using Document Type Definitions,'' in ACM CIKM'99 2nd Int. Workshop on Web Information and Data Management (WIDM'99) (Kansas City, Missouri, Nov. 5-6), ACM Press, 1999, pp. 28-32.
10.
  M.G. Welz and P.T. Wood, ``Tentacle: A Database System for the World Wide Web,'' in Proc. 9th Int. Conf. and Workshop on Database and Expert Systems Applications (Vienna, Austria, Aug. 24-28), LNCS 1460, Springer-Verlag, 1998, pp. 658-667.
11.
  M. Chavda and P.T. Wood, ``Towards an ODMG-Compliant Visual Object Query Language,'' in Proc. 23rd Int. Conf. on Very Large Data Bases (Athens, Greece, Aug. 25-29), Morgan Kaufmann, 1997, pp. 456-465.
12.
  A.O. Mendelzon and P.T. Wood, ``Finding Regular Simple Paths in Graph Databases,'' SIAM Journal on Computing, 24, 6 (Dec. 1995), 1235-1258.
13.
  M.P. Consens, A.O. Mendelzon, D. Vista and P.T. Wood, ``Constant Propagation Versus Join Reordering in Recursive Rules,'' in Proc. 2nd Int. Workshop on Rules in Database Systems (Athens, Greece, Sept. 25-27), LNCS 985, Springer-Verlag, 1995, pp. 245-259.
14.
  P.T. Wood, ``Magic Factoring of Closure Programs,'' in Proc. Fourteenth ACM Symp. on Principles of Database Systems (San Jose, California, May 22-24), ACM Press, 1995, pp. 174-183.
15.
  D. Vista and P.T. Wood, ``Efficient Evaluation of Visual Queries Using Deductive Databases,'' in Applications of Logic Databases, R. Ramakrishnan (ed.), Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1995, pp. 143-161.
16.
  P.T. Wood, ``Bottom-Up Evaluation of DataHiLog,'' in Proc. 1st Int. Workshop on Rules in Database Systems (Edinburgh, Scotland, Aug. 30-Sept. 1, 1993), Workshops in Computing Series, Springer-Verlag, 1994, pp. 401-415.
17.
  D. Vista and P.T. Wood, ``Efficient Visual Queries for Deductive Databases,'' in Proc. of the Workshop on Programming with Logic Databases in conjunction with the 1993 Int. Logic Programming Symp. (Vancouver, Canada, Oct. 30), 1993. Available as Technical Report 1183, Computer Sciences Department, University of Wisconsin-Madison, pp. 44-59.
18.
  M.M. Brand and P.T. Wood, ``A Model For Object-Oriented Databases,'' South African Computer Journal 7 (July 1992), 27-34.
19.
  R.A. Paterson-Jones and P.T. Wood, ``Hilog: A Higher-Order Logic Programming Language,'' South African Computer Journal 7 (July 1992), 53-58.
20.
  P.T. Wood, ``Efficient Evaluation of Regular Path Programs,'' South African Computer Journal 6 (Mar. 1992), 67-71.
21.
  P.T. Wood, ``Syntactic Characterizations of 1-Bounded Datalog Programs,'' in Proc. 2nd Int. Conf. on Deductive and Object-Oriented Databases (DOOD) (Munich, Germany, Dec. 16-18), LNCS 566, Springer-Verlag, 1991, pp. 208-225.
22.
  A.O. Mendelzon and P.T. Wood, ``Functional Dependencies in Horn Clause Queries,'' ACM Trans. on Database Systems 16, 1 (Mar. 1991), 31-55.
23.
  P.T. Wood, ``Factoring Augmented Regular Chain Programs,'' in Proc. 16th Int. Conf. on Very Large Data Bases (Brisbane, Australia, Aug. 13-16), Morgan Kaufmann, 1990, pp. 255-263.
24.
  P.T. Wood, ``Graph Views and Recursive Query Languages,'' in Proc. 8th British National Conf. on Databases (Univ. of York, England, July 9-11), Pitman, 1990, pp. 124-141.
25.
  P.T. Wood, ``Finding Regular Paths in Acyclic Graphs,'' South African Computer Journal 1 (Jan. 1990), 11-18.
26.
  A.O. Mendelzon and P.T. Wood, ``Finding Regular Simple Paths in Graph Databases,'' in Proc. 15th Int. Conf. on Very Large Data Bases (Amsterdam, The Netherlands, Aug. 22-25), Morgan Kaufmann, 1989, pp. 185-193.
27.
  P.T. Wood, A.O. Mendelzon and P. Atzeni, ``Idempotent Single-Predicate Horn Clauses,'' in Proc. 2nd Int. Conf. on Database Theory (Bruges, Belgium, Aug. 31-Sep. 2), LNCS 326, Springer-Verlag, 1988, pp. 129-143.
28.
  I.F. Cruz, A.O. Mendelzon and P.T. Wood, ``G+: Recursive Queries Without Recursion,'' in Proc. 2nd Int. Conf. on Expert Database Systems (Tysons Corner, Virginia, Apr. 25-27), Benjamin/Cummings, 1988, pp. 355-368.
29.
  I.F. Cruz, A.O. Mendelzon and P.T. Wood, ``A Graphical Query Language Supporting Recursion,'' in Proc. ACM SIGMOD Int. Conf. on Management of Data (San Francisco, Calif., May 27-29), ACM Press, 1987, pp. 323-330.
30.
  S.R. Schach and P.T. Wood, ``An Almost Path-Free Very High-Level Interactive Data Manipulation Language for a Microcomputer-Based Database System,'' Software: Practice and Experience 16, 3 (Mar. 1986), 243-268.
31.
  B.R. Dunman, S.R. Schach and P.T. Wood, ``A Mainframe Implementation of Concurrent Pascal,'' Software: Practice and Experience 12, 1 (Jan. 1982), 85-89.
Refereed Posters
32.
  M.G. Welz and P.T. Wood, ``The Tentacle Database System as a Web Server,'' in Proc. 16th British National Conf. on Databases (Cardiff, Wales, July 6-8), 1998, pp. 169-170.
33.
  M. Chavda and P.T. Wood, ``Combining Constraints and Data-Flow in a Visual Query Language,'' in IEEE Symp. on Visual Languages (Capri, Italy, Sept. 23-26), IEEE Computer Society Press, 1997, pp. 125-126.
34.
  M. Chavda and P.T. Wood, ``VOQL: A Visual Object Query Language,'' presented at 14th British National Conf. on Databases (Napier University, Edinburgh, July 8-10), 1996.
35.
  R.A. Paterson-Jones and P.T. Wood, ``Extending the WAM to Implement HiLog,'' in Logic Programming: Proceedings of the 1993 Int. Symp. (Vancouver, Canada, Oct. 26-29), MIT Press, 1993, p. 654.

Funding

I am one of four participants from Birkbeck in the following EU IST project under the Cross Programme Theme of Grid Testbeds. Birkbeck's share of the funding is Euro 82 000.


2002-2003 Selene: Self e-Learning Networks (IST-2001-39045) Euro 283 000


The following table lists research grants (in South African rands) I received while at the University of Cape Town, where the government agency funding science and engineering research at universities until 1998 was the Foundation for Research Development (FRD):


1997 FRD Tele-teaching grant (principal grantholder) R20 000
1996-1997 FRD Cooperative Data Visualisation (principal grantholder) R401 000
1990-1997 University Research Committee grant (principal grantholder) R46 000
1994-1995 FRD Core programme grant (principal grantholder) R48 000
1990-1994 FRD Special Programme (one of 3 grantholders) R680 000
1990-1993 FRD Core programme grant (principal grantholder) R64 000
1989 Start-up grant (principal grantholder) R5 000

Teaching

At Birkbeck College, I have taught the following courses (degree programme shown in parentheses):


2001, 2002 Querying and Representing Data on the Web (MSc in Computing Science)
2001, 2002 Developing Internet Applications (MSc in E-Commerce)


At King's College, I taught the following courses (degree programme shown in parentheses):


1999, 2000 The Internet (MSc)
1998, 1999, 2000 Architecture and assembly language programming (BSc, first year)


At UCT, I taught the following courses at various times (degree programme shown in parentheses):


Logic programming and deductive databases (BSc Honours, that is, fourth year)
Visualisation (BSc Honours--jointly with a colleague)
Relational database theory (BSc Honours)
Database systems (BSc, third year--jointly with a colleague)
Algorithms and data structures (BSc, second year--jointly with a colleague)
Formal languages and automata theory (BSc, second year)
File structures (BSc, second year)
Program verification (BSc, second year)
Computer architecture (BSc, second year--jointly with a colleague)

Postgraduate Supervision

I am currently supervising 2 part-time PhD students and co-supervising 1 full-time and 2 part-time PhD students, all of whom started in October 2002.


At King's College:


1999/2000 6 MSc projects
1998/1999 4 MSc projects


At UCT, I supervised the following MSc theses (the MSc is a 2-year research degree, where the student's thesis is examined by two international examiners):


1999 M.G. Welz `` Tentacle: A Graph-Based Database System''
1998 A.J. Luppnow `` Bottom-up Evaluation of HiLog in the Context of Deductive Database Systems''
1997 M. Chavda `` Visually Querying Object-Oriented Databases''
1996 X.J. Tian `` An Empirical Study of Negation in Datalog Programs''
1995 A.A. Maharaj `` The Efficient Evaluation of Visual Queries Within a Logic-Based Framework''
1992 M.M. Brand `` HOOD: A Higher-Order Object-Oriented Database Model and its Implementation''
1991 M.P. Wassell `` Semantic Optimisation in Datalog Programs''

External Examining

I am, or have been, external examiner for the following institutions and courses:


2002- University of Greenwich (UK) MSc Computing and Information Systems
2002- Open University (UK) M877 Advanced Database Technology
1992, 1995-6, 1998 University of Port Elizabeth (SA) Database theory module
1992-1994 University of Swaziland BSc Computer Science

Administrative and Professional Activities

Departmental Administration

At Birkbeck College, I am Chair of the School Teaching Committee, a faculty representative on the College Teaching Committee, Programme Director for the MSc in E-Commerce (2nd year), and an Admissions Tutor for the full-time MSc in Computing Science. I am also responsible for issues regarding quality assurance within the School. At King's College, I was Acting Head of Department from August 2000 until I left King's in December 2000. I was Chair of the Computer Science Board of Examiners for the BSc programme, and a member of the departmental teaching committee, from August 1998 until December 2000. At UCT, I was Acting Head of Department during 1992, and was the Deputy Head of Department from 1993 to 1997. I was course director for the Computer Science Honours course from 1989 to 1991 and from 1994 to 1996. I was also a member of the Departmental Graduate Students Committee.

Professional Activities

I am, or have been, a member of the following professional societies:


1981- Association for Computing Machinery
1989- Computer Society of the Institute for Electrical and Electronic Engineers
1992-1997 Computer Society of South Africa
1990-1996 European Association for Theoretical Computer Science


I was a member of the programme committee for the following conferences and workshops:


2002 2nd Int. Workshop on Web Dynamics Honolulu
2002 British National Conf. on Databases Sheffield
2002 VIII Int. Conf. on Extending Database Technology Prague
2001 Int. Workshop on Web Dynamics London
2000 26th Int. Conf. on Very Large Data Bases Cairo
2000 VII Int. Conf. on Extending Database Technology Konstanz
1998 24th Int. Conf. on Very Large Data Bases New York
1992 Second Int. Computer Science Conf. Hong Kong
1991 VIth South African Computer Research Symp. Caledon
1989 8th Int. Conf. on Entity-Relationship Approach Toronto
1989 Vth South African Computer Research Symp. Johannesburg


I have acted as a referee for the following journals:


ACM Transactions on Database Systems
ACM Transactions on Information Systems
Computer Networks
IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering
Information Processing Letters
Journal of Computer and System Sciences
SIAM Journal on Computing
Software: Practice and Experience
South African Computer Journal
Theoretical Computer Science


and for the 19th International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE2003).


I have also been a reviewer of research proposals for the Foundation for Research Development (South Africa), now the National Research Foundation, and the EPSRC.

About this document ...

This document was generated using the LaTeX2HTML translator Version 98.1p1 release (March 2nd, 1998)

Copyright © 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996, 1997, Nikos Drakos, Computer Based Learning Unit, University of Leeds.

The command line arguments were:
latex2html -split 0 -no_navigation cv.tex.

The translation was initiated by Peter Wood on 2003-05-20


Footnotes

...Publications1
Note that [12] is a substantially revised and extended version of [26], while [15] is a revised version of [17].


Peter Wood
2003-05-20