Zheng Zhang (Alex)

 

Contents

Work Information

Job Title

Ph.D. Candidate: My CV.

Key responsibilities

I am mainly working on two projects. One is “Fine-grained Access Control for XML Databases” supervised by Prof. Renee Miller, Prof. Mariano Consens, Prof. John Mylopoulos, and Walid Rjaibi. My colleague is Dr. Yaron Kanza. The outline of the research is described as follows.

  • To develop a fine-grained security model for XML and mixed XML-relational databases.
  • To devise implementation techniques for specification and efficient enforcement of security policies in the proposed model.
    1. Query rewriting
    2. Metadata management
    3. Safe view publishing
    4. Policy mapping
  • To build a middleware prototype that embodies the techniques above.
  • To study the incorporation of these techniques into a DBMS engine.

 

The other project I am working on is Protecting Privacy in Data Publishing supervised by Prof. Renee Miller, Prof. Mariano Consens, and Prof. John Mylopoulos. My colleague is Dr. Lee Hyun Chul and Dr. Yaron Kanza. The outline of the research is described as follows.

  • To understand when a general data-publishing setting will leak secrets,
    1. When there is only one state of the underlying database
    2. When there are a series of states of the underlying database
  • To develop algorithms to test whether those settings provide privacy.
  • To develop heuristics that suggests private settings for users based on input settings.

 

Research Interest

My research focuses on Database privacy and security. Besides the above projects, I also have interests in privacy-preserving data mining and forum searches.

Department

DataBase Group, University of Toronto.

 

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Contributions to Research and Development

·         [ZR08] Zheng Zhang, Walid Rjaibi. Inter-Node Relationship Labeling: A Fine-Grained XML Access Control Implementation Using Generic Security Labels. To appear in e-Business and Telecommunication Networks, Springer, 2008.

·         [ZR06] Zheng Zhang, Walid Rjaibi. Inter-Node Relationship Labeling: A Fine-Grained XML Access Control Implementation Using Generic Security Labels. IBM Invention Disclosure#CA8-2006-0091, 2006.

·         [ZR06] Zheng Zhang, Walid Rjaibi. Inter-Node Relationship Labeling: A Fine-Grained XML Access Control Implementation Using Generic Security Labels. In the Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Security and Cryptography, Setúbal, Portugal, 2006

·         [KMMZ06] Yaron Kanza, Alberto Mendelzon, Renee Miller, and Zheng Zhang. Authorization-transparent Access Control for XML under the Non-Truman model. In the Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Extending Database Technology, Munich, Germany, 2006

·         [ZM06] Zheng, Zhang, Alberto Mendelzon. Authorization Views and Conditional Query Containment. To appear Journal of Computer and System Sciences.

·         [ZM05] Zheng, Zhang, Alberto Mendelzon. Authorization Views and Conditional Query Containment. In the Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Database Theory, Edinburgh , Scotland , 2005

·         [ZM04] Zheng, Zhang, Alberto Mendelzon. Conditional Query Authorization for Fine-Grained Access Control. In the Proceedings of the 14th Annual Canadian Conference on Intelligent Systems, Ottawa, Canada, 2004.

·         [ZL02] Zheng Zhang, James J. Little. 2nd Order Anisotropic Diffusion for Smoothing Height Surfaces. In the Proceedings of the 4th Annual Scientific Conference of the GEOIDE Network, Toronto, Canada, 2002.

 

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Favorite Links

  1. DB Group, UofT
  2. CS Dept, UofT
  3. CS Dept, UBC
  4. SIGMOD/PODS  
  5. VLDB
  6. ICDE
  7. ICDT
  8. PORTAL
  9. DBLP

 

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Contact Information

E-mail address

zhzhang at cs dot toronto dot edu

Web address

www.cs.toronto.edu/~zhzhang/

Office phone

1 416 946 8413

 

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Current Projects

  1. Fine-grained Access Control for XML Databases
  2. Privacy in Data Exchange and Publishing

Finished Projects

  1. Conditional Query Containment, full paper, supervised by Prof. Alberto Mendelzon, DB Group, UofT.
  2. OLAP: Efficient Querying and Maintenance Techniques for Quotient Cubes, supervised by Prof. Laks V.S. Lakshmanan, DB Group, UBC.
  3. 2nd Order Anisotropic Diffusion for Smoothing Height Surfaces supervised by Prof. James J. Little, Lab of Computational Intelligence, UBC. The work is part of the Geoide Project: Transportation and Commerce.

 

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Biographical Information

I started studying in the Department of Computer Science at the University of British Columbia (UBC) as a freshman in Sept. 1999 and got a Combined Honours Bachelor Degree in Computer Science and Mathematics in May 2002. During my days at UBC, I won numerous awards and honours. The most prestigious ones are Canada Governor General’s Silver Medal in Science as the best student in the graduating class in the Faculty of Science at UBC in 2002 (the Gold Medal is for Masters and Ph.D.’s); G.C.Webber Memorial Prize as the most outstanding student in the graduating class in the Department of Mathematics at UBC; and Rick Sample Memorial Research Scholarship as the best student in the Department of Computer Science at UBC. In 2002, I joined the Database Group in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto. My supervisor is Prof. Alberto Mendelzon.

 

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Teaching

 

 

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