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The Australian National University

Welcome to the ANU Data Mining and Matching group.

We conduct research in a diverse range of topics, focusing on the broad area of data integration and especially record linkage (data matching or entity resolution).

Projects we are working on:

  1.  Practical aspects of entity resolution
  2.  Privacy-preserving record linkage of multiple database
  3.  Attack methods for multi-database privacy-preserving record linkage
  4.  Dynamic and temporal record linkage
  5.  Linking historical census and registry data

A new discussion forum on data linkage DLforum, and our demos GeCo and MERLIN are online!
Give them a try!

Our group:

group-photo

From left to right: Charini, Yichen, Si, Anushka, Peter, Jeff, and Thilina (missing: Qing Wang)

  • Peter Christen works on different aspects of record linkage, including privacy-preserving record linkage, linking temporal and dynamic data, and linking historical birth, death, marriage and census records.
  • He is also interested in active learning for record linkage, and how to properly evaluate record linkage quality.

  • Qing Wang works on data linkage that focuses in answering two questions: (a) how can data from different sources be linked in a meaningful way; and (b) how can data linkage be used for providing useful knowledge? 
  • She is working on the following projects of data linkage: (1) studying provenance-aware entity resolution which can leverage provenance information to improve the reliability of data linkage; (2) building dynamic repairing techniques for improving entity resolution classifiers over time; (3) developing knowledge-based representation, learning and reasoning techniques for data linkage.

  • Jeffrey Fisher is working on collective entity resolution techniques in domains such as group linkage, population reconstruction and temporal entity resolution.
  • The focus of his work is on finding solutions to problems which limit the use of many collective entity resolution techniques in practice, including poor scalability, difficulty of evaluation, and lack of appropriate training data.

  • Thilina Ranbaduge is working on privacy-preserving record linkage techniques (PPRL) for multiple databases and temporal PPRL  as part of Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery Projects DP130101801 and DP160101934. His main focus is to develop scalable techniques for efficient and effective PPRL for multiple databases and to use temporal information for accurate linkage of database records.

  • Yichen Hu is working on temporal record linkage techniques which link records collected over time to entities to which they refer. The aim of his research is to develop algorithms to link records efficiently using temporal information in databases.

  • Anushka Vidanage is currently working on privacy attacks for privacy-preserving record linkage (PPRL). His main objective is to explore and develop privacy attacks on binary representation based encoding techniques (e.g. Bloom filters) used in PPRL to evaluate the privacy guarantees provided by those techniques.

  • Charini Nanayakkara is currently working on record linkage of complex historical birth, marriage, death and census Data. Her ultimate objective is to develop effective and scalable record linkage techniques based on which high quality population reconstruction can be achieved.

Adjunct members:

Updated:  18 June 2020/Responsible Officer:  Head of School /Page Contact:  DMM Webmaster