The National Science Foundation has given an early career development award to Todd Green, assistant professor of computer science. The prestigious CAREER award is worth $550,000 over five years and will support Green's work on making better use of data warehouses — huge repositories of data collected by businesses and other organizations.

Businesses want to use that data, such as sales records, to make better decisions, Green said. But the sheer scale of the data warehouses makes it difficult to query a database and get answers quickly. The results of queries are usually discarded.

Green's project, called "Scrapple," aims to save these query results and use them to generate answers to new, related queries. The name comes from a Pennsylvania dish made of pork scraps — in other words, recycled leftovers.

"There is tremendous latent energy in the discarded query results, if we only knew how to recycle them to help answer subsequent related queries," Green said.

The Scrapple project will involve both theoretical work and building a computing system to implement it, he said. The source code will be released publicly.

Green received his bachelor's degree in computer science from Yale University in 1997, his Master of Science from the University of Washington in 2001, and his doctorate in computer and information science from the University of Pennsylvania in 2009. Prior to beginning his doctorate, he worked for four years at Microsoft Corp. as a software design engineer and development lead, and for two years at Xyleme as a software design engineer.

CAREER awards are intended to support the work of academic scientists and engineers at an early stage in their careers, especially by helping them to take on graduate students who carry out research as part of the training.