AnHai Doan is an associate professor in the database group at
Wisconsin-Madison. He did his undergrad in Hungary, where he ran a
profitable cigarette resale business and learned Pascal and
English. Next he did his Ph.D. in the U.S., where he started in AI but
switched midway to databases (to graduate faster). His dissertation
studied schema/ontology matching, and received the ACM Doctoral
Dissertation Award in 2003. Since then he has worked extensively in
information integration and extraction, structured Web databases, and
human computation. He was a Sloan fellow in 2007, and has consulted
extensively in industry and government. Currently he's on leave as
Chief Scientist for Kosmix, a startup that builds structured databases
over social media. When not working, he's traveling and moonlighting
on a data integration textbook as well as his memoir in Vietnamese,
which details his path from cigarette seller to textbook writer, and
the lessons he has learned along the way.