Renée Miller has made a name for herself in the world of computer science and applied mathematics, particularly surrounding big data — “any data that one human can’t get their head around,” she joked.

Among her numerous awards, including the U.S. Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, one of her most early collaborative research papers was granted the 2020 Alonzo Church Award for Outstanding Contributions to Logic and Computation. She is a university distinguished professor of computer science at Khoury College.

“The work that I got this award for was one of the turning points in my career,” Miller said. “It was a very successful collaboration, where I worked with three other people at IBM, who all had different skills and are very nice people that I’ve continued to work with over the years. And it shaped my views of collaboration.”

The Church Award recognizes the significance of a research paper, or papers, within the last 25 years. Her research began with her first sabbatical across the country where she did research at Stanford and eventually IBM, where she and her team explored a new way of doing data integration called data exchange. The intention was to create a smoother, efficient program to translate data for a group of IBM’s biology researchers who shared how tedious the translation process is.

After building the program, Miller and the team tried to prove theorems about the tool and why it works, and the team could not find an answer. They even sought out mathematician expert and IBM Fellow Ronald Fagin for insight.

“We thought it was going to be a one-hour conversation, and [Fagin] would pull up a textbook and say, ‘Well, here’s the theorem,’” she said. “But it turns out there was no theorem or theory on this.”

This ultimately led to the creation of a new theory, called the Theory of Data Exchange, and more than anything, Miller enjoys seeing her work used in real-world applications.

“I thought computer science, which is really applied mathematics, is more my cup of tea because it has applications where you can see the impact of your work,” she said, admiring the real-world value in using mathematical tools to study formal problems and theory. “… They have impact in that my first set of results were used in IBM to actually create their data integration product. So it was nice to see people using it in practice to solve real translation problems.”

While Miller always knew she loved mathematics and computer science, her decision to shift her focus from theory to databases was influenced by her PhD advisor and mentor Yannis Ioannidis at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

“When you pick your PhD advisor, it’s a critical choice because you’re working with this person for five years, sometimes six, and so you have to like them as a human being, you have to like them ethically, you have to understand the way they think,” Miller said. “And that is more important than the specific area.”

Outside of her research, Miller enjoys speaking and learning French — especially scientific jargon — as well as playing the piano.

“I was going to knock on the door of the New England Conservatory of Music and get a student to teach me some jazz,” Miller said, explaining how she was only classically trained. “That was on my to-do list for this year, but it’s hard to do piano lessons by Zoom.”

She also has a passion for travel, which she was able to pursue during her two-year leave of absence before completing her PhD. Miller, wanting to hold off on the research portion of her PhD track, instead took an opportunity to work at Bell Labs in New Jersey, spawning multiple international trips to Stockholm, Seoul, Geneva and Istanbul, to name a few. At the end of her leave, she had a decision to make.

“It was a hard choice for me,” she said. “… I had a lovely job and I got to see and travel the world on an expense account, which was great. But at the end of two years, I was already bored with the technical part of I was doing, so I thought, ‘Oh, I really should go back and get a PhD and see if I can do it.’”

Miller now is dealing with open data, particularly government information that is available to the public, per former President Barack Obama’s Open Data Initiative in 2013 to increase government transparency.

An issue with open data right now, she explained, is that a broad topic search will generate thousands of data sets, but for narrower, more specific queries, the search will come up empty.

“The intention is very good, but it’s incredibly hard to find what you want,” Miller said. “There’s not very good search mechanisms on these, so most of the search capabilities on these portals are kind of derived from web search, [or] keyword search.”

Above all, no matter the type of data, Miller is a professor and researcher of passion and is optimistic about her future projects, so long as she finds joy in her work.

“I’m having fun, and I like working with my students,” she said. “As long as I’m having fun, I’ll keep doing it.”