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Prof. Ada Wai-chee Fu, Associate Professor, Department of Computer Science and Engineering at The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) has been recently awarded the Influential Paper Award at the 25th IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE 2009) in Shanghai for her co-authored paper ‘Efficient Time Series Matching by Wavelets’. The ICDE assessed papers presented 10 years ago for the single Influential Paper Award this year. Firstly presented at ICDE 1999, Prof. Fu’s pioneering research paper proposed Wavelets as an efficient time series matching technique, and has been highly regarded by the database community.

A time series is a sequence of real numbers, with each number representing a value at a time point. It appears in many everyday life activities, such as stock prices, currency exchange rates, biomedical measurements, or weather data. It is necessary to analyse the vast amount of data collected over time to extract useful information speedily. Time series analysis is therefore an interesting and important research problem.

The paper proposed the first efficient time series indexing method by making use of discrete wavelet transform (DWT), which greatly influenced subsequent works on indexing of time series. Although Discrete Fourier Transform (DFT) has been one of the most commonly used technique in the area, this paper showed that it may not be the best representation for dimensionality reduction in time series, and led to significant research into alternative representations as well as wavelet-based scalable data analysis.

Prof. John C.S. Lui, Professor and Chairman of the Computer Science and Engineering Department, congratulated Prof. Fu for her outstanding achievement. ‘Prof. Fu has demonstrated her high calibre in research throughout her many years of service in our department. Her winning of this top award in one of the most prestigious database conferences in the world has once again affirmed the excellence and commitment of CUHK in information sciences research.’

Prof. Fu received her BSc degree in computer science from CUHK, and both MSc and PhD degrees in Computer Science from Simon Fraser University in Canada. She worked at Bell Northern Research in Ottawa, Canada for four years before joining CUHK in 1993. Her research interests include: issues on distributed databases, XML data, time series databases, data mining, content-based retrieval in multimedia databases, parallel and distributed systems.

The ICDE is a premier forum for presentation of research results, advanced data-intensive applications, and discussion of issues on data and knowledge engineering. The mission of the conference is to share research solutions to problems of today’s information society and to identify new issues and directions for future research and development work.