Hamdi Ben Hamadou has joined the Department of Computer Science, Aalborg University as Postdoctoral Researcher in the Database and Web technologies group.
He received his Bachelor’s and Master’s degree in computer science from the Higher Institute of Computer Science and Multimedia Sfax in Tunisia. Furthermore, Hamdi Ben Hamadou holds a PhD degree from the University of Toulouse III-Paul Sabatier in France.
Describe your area and research interest:
I am currently involved in the Flexible Energy Denmark (FED) project, where we are contributing to the design and deployment of the national energy data lake.
The project gathers Danish research institutions, energy tech companies, and living labs, working together to enable the green transition towards a low-carbon society based on intermittent renewable energy sources.
The challenges that we are working on are related to the ingestion, management, and processing of large volumes of heterogenous data. This is mainly energy consumption and production data generated by several Danish living labs, where data can be batch data, e.g., daily or yearly consumption data, or real-time data. Furthermore, we are working on non-typical big data challenges by identifying sensitive data and enforcing access management to comply with GDPR compliance.
During my PhD, I was involved in an experimental smart campus in the frame of neOCampus project. In this project, we collected sensor data, e.g., humidity, luminosity, noise, or Co2, from different sensors implemented in classrooms and the university library to study the quality of life inside these buildings.
We worked on a module that ingested real-time sensor data, modelled the data, and offered a transparent querying mechanism for the different partners to query heterogenous sensor data.
Furthermore, we proposed a novel approach, based on formal foundations, for building schema-independent queries, designed to query heterogenous documents stores. The approach consists of a query enrichment mechanism that consults a pre-constructed dictionary. This dictionary binds each possible path in the documents to all its corresponding absolute paths in all the documents.
We automated the process of query reformulation via a set of rules that reformulate most document store operators. Thus, our contribution offers schema-independent querying without the need to learn new querying languages and new structures, or to perform heavy transformation on the underlying document structures.
My PhD thesis was subject to several publications, two received best paper awards, and I received best PhD thesis award at the French national conference INFORSID in 2020.
Why did you choose to continue your career at Aalborg University?
I am delighted to join Aalborg University, one of the best universities in Europe within this research field. Furthermore, there is a strong international environment and community, which I appreciate. I also look forward to gaining insights into the Problem Based Learning method.