Keynote Speakers

Tuesday, December 20th, 9:00-10:30am

Michael J. Franklin
University of California, Berkeley

HiFi — Network-centric query processing in the physical world

Advances in wireless sensors, RFID technology, and mobile devices have enabled the development of information systems that monitor and react to events in the real world. When deployed on a large (e.g., national) scale, these systems assume a high fan-in architecture, in which vast numbers of events measured at the edges of the network are continually refined, summarized, augmented, and aggregated as they flow towards the interior. High fan-in systems present a wealth of new research problems reflecting the different concerns and priorities at each level of the system as well as the interactions among the levels. The solutions will require insights from recent efforts in data stream processing, sensor databases, event systems, data warehousing, and spatio-temporal data management. In this talk I will identify the key characteristics and challenges presented by high fan-in systems, and argue for a uniform, query-based approach towards addressing them. I will then present the design of HiFi, the system we are building to embody these ideas, and describe an initial proof-of-concept prototype that is capable of combining data from RFID readers, barcode scanners, and clusters of sensor motes.

Biography: Michael Franklin is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of California, Berkeley. His research focuses on the architecture and performance of distributed databases and information systems. At Berkeley his current projects cover the areas of sensor networks, XML message brokers, data stream processing, scientific grid computing, and data management for the digital home. He spent several years as a database systems developer prior to receiving his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin, Madison in 1993. Franklin has served as Program Committee Chair for the 2002 ACM SIGMOD Conference on the Management of Data, and as PC Co-Chair for the 2005 IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering. He is on the editorial boards of ACM Transactions on Database Systems and the VLDB Journal and was previously the Area Editor for database systems for ACM Computing Surveys and Editor-in-Chief of the ACM SIGMOD Record. Franklin has worked widely in industry, with both well-established and emerging technology companies. In 2003 he was an Executive-in-Residence at the Mayfield Fund, a venture capital firm in Menlo Park, CA. He has held visiting faculty positions at INRIA (France) and the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. He recieved the NSF CAREER award in 1995.

Wednesday, December 21st, 9:00-10:30am

Jayant R. Haritsa
Database Systems Lab
Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore

Drawing Out the Artistic Talents of Database Query Optimizers

A "plan diagram" is a pictorial enumeration of the execution plan choices of a database query optimizer over the relational selectivity space. We have recently developed a tool, called Picasso, for automatically generating plan diagrams. In this talk, we present and analyze representative plan diagrams produced by Picasso on a suite of popular commercial query optimizers for queries based on the TPC-H benchmark. These diagrams, which often appear similar to cubist paintings, provide a variety of interesting insights, including that current optimizers make extremely fine-grained plan choices, which may often be supplanted by less efficient options without substantively affecting the quality; that the plan optimality regions may have highly intricate patterns and irregular boundaries, indicating strongly non-linear cost models; that non-monotonic cost behavior exists where increasing result cardinalities decrease the estimated cost; and, that the basic assumptions underlying the research literature on parametric query optimization often do not hold in practice. The talk will conclude with a discussion on the implications of these results for next-generation database query optimizers.

Biography: Jayant R. Haritsa is on the faculty of the Supercomputer Education & Research Centre and the Department of Computer Science & Automation at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore. He received the BTech degree in Electronics and Communications Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology (Madras), and the MS and PhD degrees in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin (Madison). His research interests are in database systems. He is a recipient of the Swarnajayanti Fellowship from the Government of India, and the Sir C V Raman Young Scientist Award from the Government of Karnataka.

Thursday, December 22nd, 9:00-10:30am

Andrei Z. Broder
Yahoo! Research

The next stage in Web IR: From query based Information Retrieval to context driven Information Supply

In the past decade, Web search engines have evolved from a first generation based on classic Information Retrieval (IR) scaled up to web size and supporting only informational queries, to a second generation supporting navigational queries using web specific information (primarily link analysis), and then to a third generation enabling transactional and other "semantic" queries based on a variety of technologies aimed to directly satisfy the unexpressed "user intent." What is coming next? In this talk, we argue for the trend towards context driven Information Supply, that is, the goal of Web IR will widen to include the supply of relevant information without requiring the user to make an explicit query. The information supply concept greatly precedes information retrieval. (Newspapers, or even the "Acta Diurna" of ancient Rome.) What is new in the web framework, is the ability to supply relevant information specific to a given activity and a given user, while the activity is being performed. A prime example is the matching of ads to content being read, however the information supply paradigm is starting to appear in other contexts such as social networks, e-commerce, browsers, and others.

Biography: Andrei Broder has recently joined Yahoo! Research as a Yahoo! Research Fellow and Vice President of Emerging Search Technology. Previously he was an IBM Distinguished Engineer and the CTO of the Institute for Search and Text Analysis in IBM Research. From 1999 until early 2002 he was Vice President for Research and Chief Scientist at the AltaVista Company. Before that he has been a senior member of the research staff at Compaq's Systems Research Center in Palo Alto. He was graduated Summa cum Laude from Technion, the Israeli Institute of Technology, and obtained his M.Sc. and Ph.D. in Computer Science at Stanford University under Don Knuth. His main research interests are the design, analysis, and implementation of randomized algorithms and supporting data structures, in particular in the context of web-scale information retrieval and applications. Broder is co-winner of the Best Paper award at WWW6 (for his work on duplicate elimination of web pages) and at WWW9 (for his work on mapping the web). He has published more than seventy papers and was awarded twenty patents. He serves as chair of the IEEE Technical Committee on Mathematical Foundations of Computing and was recently elected an IEEE Fellow.