Joint work with Antoine Amarilli, Pierre Bourhis, Mikaël Monet, Silviu Maniu.

In this talk, we review recent work on the problem of efficiently querying probabilistic databases, i.e., compact representations of probability distributions over databases, by exploiting the structure of the data. In the deterministic setting, a celebrated result by Courcelle shows that any monadic second-order query can be evaluated in linear-time on instances of bounded treewidth. We show that this result generalizes to probabilistic instances through the use of provenance. In the probabilistic setting, we show that a bound on the treewidth is necessary for query evaluation to be tractable, in sharp contrast with the deterministic setting. This leads us to studying which real-world databases actually have low treewidth, and to propose practical algorithms for query evaluation in databases that can be partially decomposed in a low-treewidth part and a high-treewidth core.

Pierre Senellart is a Professor in the Computer Science Department at the École normale supérieure in Paris, France, and the head of the Valda team of Inria Paris. He is an alumnus of ENS and obtained his M.Sc. (2003) and Ph.D. (2007) in computer science from Université Paris-Sud, studying under the supervision of Serge Abiteboul. He was awarded an Habilitation à diriger les recherches in 2012 from Université Pierre et Marie Curie. Before joining ENS, he was an Associate Professor (2008–2013) then a Professor (2013–2016) at Télécom ParisTech. He also held secondary appointments as Lecturer at the University of Hong Kong in 2012–2013, and as Senior Research Fellow at the National University of Singapore from 2014 to 2016. His research interests focus around practical and theoretical aspects of Web data management, including Web crawling and archiving, Web information extraction, uncertainty management, Web mining, and intensional data management.