I'm a Computer Science PhD candidate at Indiana University, and part of the Database Lab.

My research is on structural indexes for XML databases, I work with my advisor Dr. Melanie Wu on the design and development of a new family of structural indexes (the Trie indexes). We follow a methodology that couples the partitions induced by fragments of the XPath algebra and those induced by the structural properties of an XML document to lead the design of our indexes.

Our results so far show that the Trie indexes are capable of answering XPath queries with arbitrarily complicated predicates using index-only plans and improving query performance in orders of magnitude over similar aproaches. Our next steps involve developing a workload-aware version of our indexes and how to organize and include the use of statistical information about the indexed document.

For more details, check the Papers section below.

Dr. Ed Robertson leads the Software Engineering courses at IU, where students go through a two semester project for a real client in the Bloomington community, trying to simulate an actual working environment as close as possible to an actual job, with managers from the Software Engineering Management class, weekly team meetings, logs, proper documentation, and everything CS graduates will find when they get a job.

I've been the AI for a few years now, and it's a really fun course to be involved with. It's a lot of hard work, but students that have taken it keep saying it was worth it.

Sofía Brenes, Yuqing Wu, Dirk Van Gucht, Pablo Santa Cruz. Trie Indexes for Efficient XML Query Evaluation. 11th International Workshop on Web and Databases (WebDB), 2008.

Sofía Brenes and Yuqing Wu. Structural Summaries for Efficient XML Query Processing. EDBT PhD Workshop, 2008. Best Submission Award.

George H.L. Fletcher, Dirk Van Gucht, Yuqing Wu, Marc Gyssens, Sofía Brenes, Jan Paredaens. A Methodology for Coupling Fragments of XPath with Structural Indexes for XML Documents. 11th International Symposium on Database Programming Languages (DBPL), 2007.

Sofía Brenes and Alejandro Valerio. Case Based Concept Map Topology Counselor. 2nd International Conference on Concept Mapping (CMC), 2006.

David B. Leake, Ana Gabriela Maguitman, Thomas Reichherzer, Alberto J. Cañas, Marco M. Carvalho, Marco Arguedas, Sofía Brenes, Thomas C. Eskridge. Aiding Knowledge Capture by Searching for Extensions of Knowledge Models. 2nd International Conference on Knowledge Capture (K-CAP), 2003.

Academic

• 2005 - present. PhD Computer Science. Indiana University. Expected Graduation May 2009.
• 2003 - 2005. MSc Computer Science. Indiana University.
• 1998 - 2002. BSc Computer Science Engineer. Instituto Tecnológico de Costa Rica.

Professional

• Fall 2005 - Present. Associate Instructor - Software Engineering. Computer Science Department, Indiana University. Bloomington, IN.
• May - August 2008 - Software Engineering Intern. Google. Mountain View, CA.
• May - August 2007 - Software Engineering Intern. Google. Mountain View, CA.
• August 2003 - May 2005. Research Associate. Pervasive Technology Labs at Indiana University. Bloomington, IN.
• July 2001 - July 2003. Visiting Research Associate. Institute for Human and Machine Cognition. Pensacola, FL.

Other

• Member of the National Honor Society for Informatics.
• No, I don't have a middle name. It's two last names.
• Pictures.
• This is home.