John C. Shafer

Applied Scientist

1065 La Avenida, Mountain View, CA 94043
John.Shafer [at] microsoft.com
office: +1-650-693-2205

John Shafer is an Applied Scientist at Microsoft Search Labs in Mountain View, California, where he is working on using data mining to improve search quality.

He received a B.S. in Computer Science and Engineering from Cornell University in 1992, and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin - Madison in 1998. His thesis was on the design and implementation of parallel algorithms for large-scale data-mining, most of this work being done while a member of the Quest Data Mining group at IBM Almaden Research Center (1994-2000). The implementations of these algorithms were subsequently incorprated into IBM's Intelligent Miner for Data product.

Prior to joining Search Labs, John worked in industry for 6 years, first at Propel Systems (2000-2001), developing a scalable and distributed platform for eCommerce, and more recently at BEA Systems, developing core infrastructure for their Business Process Modeling and Enterprise Service Bus products, shipping several versions of each over the last 4.5 years.

List of selected publications

• Michael J. Carey, Steve Kirsch, Mary Roth, Bert Van der Linden, Nicolas Adiba, Michael Blow, Daniela Florescu, David Li, Ivan Oprencak, Rajendra Panwar, Runping Qi, David Rieber, John C. Shafer, Brian Sterling, Tolga Urhan, Brian Vickery, Dan Wineman and Kuan Yee: The Propel Distributed Services Platform. VLDB 2001: 671-674
• John C. Shafer and Rakesh Agrawal: Continuous querying in database-centric Web applications. WWW 2000: 519-531 (2000)
• John C. Shafer and Rakesh Agrawal: Parallel Algorithms for High-dimensional Similarity Joins for Data Mining Applications. VLDB 1997: 176-185
• Rakesh Agrawal, Manish Mehta, John C. Shafer, Ramakrishnan Srikant, Andreas Arning and Toni Bollinger: The Quest Data Mining System. KDD 1996: 244-249
• John C. Shafer, Rakesh Agrawal and Manish Mehta: SPRINT: A Scalable Parallel Classifier for Data Mining. VLDB 1996: 544-555
• Rakesh Agrawal and John C. Shafer: Parallel Mining of Association Rules. IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering 8(6): 962-969 (1996)
• David J. DeWitt, Jeffrey F. Naughton, John C. Shafer and Shivakumar Venkataraman: Parallelising OODBMS Traversals: A Performance Evaluation. The VLDB Journal 5(1): 3-18 (1996)
• Erik Selberg and Oren Etzioni. Multi-Service Search and Comparison using the MetaCrawler. In Proceedings of the 4th International World Wide Web Conference, Dec., 1995.
• David J. DeWitt, Jeffrey F. Naughton, John C. Shafer and Shivakumar Venkataraman: ParSets for Parallelizing OODBMS Traversals: Implementation and Performance. PDIS 1994: 111-120