Invited Industrial Talks


1. Internet Research: What's hot in Search, Advertizing, and Cloud Computing

Duration: 45 minutes
Presenter: Rajeev Rastogi
Yahoo! Labs Bangalore
Session Chair: Srinath Srinivasa

Abstract :
Web search is one of the most widely used Internet applications, online advertizing is key for companies to make money on the Internet, and cloud computing allows Internet services to be delivered to hundreds of millions of users. In this talk, we discuss the current landscape and future trends in each of these 3 critical areas. Specifically, we highlight the role of information extraction, multimedia search, and Web classification technologies in powering Web search evolution. We also examine the key research challenges in matching ads to page views in the various advertizing models prevalent on the Internet today. And finally, we present some of the main technical challenges in realizing massive clouds with efficient utilization computing resources.

Biography:
Rajeev Rastogi is the Vice President of Yahoo! Labs Bangalore where he directs basic and applied research in the areas of Web search, advertizing, and cloud computing. Previously Rajeev was a Bell Labs Fellow and the founding Director of the Bell Labs Research Center in Bangalore, India. Rajeev worked at Bell Labs from 1993 until 2008. During the period, he led a number of research projects that were incorporated into Lucent products and services. These include the Datablitz main-memory database system, the Fellini multimedia storage server, and the NetInventory auto-discovery engine. His research interests include database systems, data mining, and network management. His most recent research has focused on the areas of network monitoring, network graph compression and analysis, and information extraction.
Rajeev is active in the fields of databases, data mining, and networking, and has served on the program committees of several conferences in these areas. He currently serves on the editorial board of the CACM, and has been an Associate editor for IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering in the past. He has published over 125 papers, and filed over 70 patents of which 40 have been issued. Rajeev received his B. Tech degree from IIT Bombay, and a PhD degree in Computer Science from the University of Texas, Austin.


2. Building Internet Scale Applications using a Distributed Cache

Duration: 45 minutes
Presenter: Seshu Adunuthula
Development Manager, Microsoft Distributed Caching Solution
Session Chair: Srinath Srinivasa

Abstract :
Distributed cache is becoming a key application platform component for providing scalability and high availability in Internet Scale Applications. In-memory caching had traditionally been used primarily for meeting the high performance requirements. By fusing caches on multiple nodes into a single unified cache however, the distributed caches offer not only high performance, but also scale of several millions concurrent users required by the Internet Scale applications at peak times. By maintaining copies of data on multiple cache nodes (in a mutually consistent manner), the distributed cache can also offer high availability to these applications.
In this talk we will focus on some scenarios related to distributed caching from well known social networking and user-generated content sites and look at how distributed caching allows for the required scale and availability on these sites. We will also drill into the design and architecture of the Microsoft Distributed Caching solution called Velocity that allows it to achieve the scalability and availability requirements.

Biography:
Seshu Adunuthula is the Development Manager for Microsoft Distributed Caching Solution called Velocity and a small foot print embedded database called SQL Server Compact. Before joining Microsoft IDC in 2006, he had worked for twelve years at Oracle Redwood Shores as a Developer and a Development Manager for Oracle Middle-tier Components including Servlet and EJB Containers. He also built from ground up the Business Activity Monitoring solution for Oracle which is now an important component of the Oracle SOA offering. He did his Bachelors in Computer Science from BITS Pilani and Masters from University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.


3. Sybase Appliance for Extreme Analytics

Duration: 45 minutes
Presenter: Shailesh Mungikar
Senior Engineer and Architect, Sybase Software (India) Pvt. Ltd.
Session Chair: Anand Deshpande

Abstract :
Enterprise Data Warehouses (EDWs) are stretched beyond their performance capacity because of mixed workloads, increased number of users, and increased data volumes which, in some cases, can grow greater than 60% a year. Customers are looking to off-load their analytics applications to specialized servers. Furthermore, IT is getting increased pressure from upper management and their Line-of-Business sponsors to fix the performance problems in weeks rather than months. These business requirements of EDWs are referred to as "extreme analytics". The Sybase Analytic Appliance enables EDWs to support extreme analytics. The presentation will cover few interesting ideas related to the Sybase Analytic Appliance (which comprises the following components):

Biography:
Sybase is acknowledged as one of the world leaders in Business Intelligence and Datawarehousing products space. Sybase provides BI solutions to many leading organizations in the Telecommunications and Financial industries. Shailesh is working as a Senior Developer and Architect in the Business Intelligence space for Sybase R&D in Pune, India. Shailesh's software research and development career spans over 15 years. His research interests include Enterprise Middleware, Application Server, Infrastructure programming, and Open Source. Previously, he has worked in Research Labs for leading US based organizations such as BEA Systems. Shailesh holds a B.E in Computers from the Pune Institute of Computer Technology, Pune, India and a Masters Degree in Software Systems from BITS, Pilani.


4. BI on Data and Content Together: What will you do with the derived insights?

Duration: 45 minutes
Presenter: Mukesh Mohania
Senior Manager in IBM India Research Lab
Session Chair: Anand Deshpande

Abstract :
Faced with growing knowledge management needs, enterprises are increasingly realizing the importance of seamlessly integrating critical business information distributed across both structured and unstructured data sources. This is especially true for financial institutions, where they can potentially use this integration to gain critical insights into customer trends, fraud and market trends. In this talk, we describe a technology and tool, Linkage Discovery, that associates the customer interactions (emails and transcribed phone calls) with customer and account profiles stored in an existing data warehouse. The associations discovered by Linkage Discovery enable analytics spanning the customer and account profiles on one hand and the meta-data associated or derived from the interaction (using text mining techniques) on the other. We show that actionable insights derived using this tool can be fed back into the system to achieve measurable gains in the business. We also show that using either data or content in isolation will not provide the kind of deep analysis possible when the two are combined.

Biography:
Mukesh Mohania received his Ph.D. in Computer Science & Engineering from Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, India in 1995. Currently, he is a senior manager in IBM India Research Lab, and leading Information Management research group. He has worked in the areas of distributed databases, data warehousing, data integration, and autonomic computing. He received the best paper award for his XML and context-oriented data integration work in CIKM 2004 and CIKM 2005, respectively. He received an award from IBM Tivoli Software in 2004 for his research contribution to Policy Management for Autonomic Computing product. He was also a recipient of the "Excellence in People Management" award in IBM India in 2007. He received the Outstanding Innovation Award from IBM Corporation in 2008 for his Context-Oriented Information Integration work. He is an IEEE and ACM Distinguished Speaker.