Virtually every data-driven discipline today is wrestling with the challenges of taking heterogeneous data, cleaning and integrating it, and making it usable for data science and discovery. The task of data integration requires insights from AI, databases, and the target application domain – and it continues to require both human and machine effort. In this lecture, sponsored by the Organon for the Information Age project at the Neubauer Collegium, Zachary Ives outlined some of the basic techniques that have been developed to aid in the process, and shared practical experiences and lessons learned developing data integration solutions for the life sciences.

Zachary Ives is the department chair and Adani President's Distinguished Professor of Computer and Information Science at the University of Pennsylvania. He is a co-founder of Blackfynn, Inc., a company focused on enabling life sciences research and discovery through data integration. Zack's research interests include data integration and sharing, managing "big data," sensor networks, and data provenance and authoritativeness. He is a recipient of the NSF CAREER award and an alumnus of the DARPA Computer Science Study Panel and Information Science and Technology advisory panel. He has also been awarded the Christian R. and Mary F. Lindback Foundation Award for Distinguished Teaching. He is a co-author of the textbook Principles of Data Integration and has received a ten-year Most Influential Paper award from ICDE, an SWSA Ten-Year Award from the International Semantic Web Conference, and a Best Demonstration Award from VLDB. He has been an associate editor for Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment and a program co-chair for the ACM SIGMOD conference.