Keynote Speakers

Wednesday, December 17th, 9:30-11:00am

Surajit Chaudhuri
Head, Data Management Research
Microsoft Research, Redmond WA, USA

Abstract : Businesses rely on complex queries to enable data analysis. Yet, our understanding of how to handle complex queries is at best half-developed. Admittedly, this is a problem that is hardly new. Therefore, it is not surprising that the research world has moved on to newer problems. Yet, I argue that understanding the central technical problems and addressing them are foundational - as relevant for cloud data services for BI as they are for traditional BI software. In my talk, I will focus on a few of these challenges - resource governance and monitoring, physical design, and query optimization.

Biography: Surajit Chaudhuri is a Principal Researcher and a Research Area Manager at Microsoft Research, Redmond. Surajit has a PhD from Stanford University and is an ACM Fellow. He was awarded the ACM SIGMOD Contributions Award in 2004 and a 10 year VLDB Best paper Award in 2007.

Thursday, December 18th, 9:00-10:30am

S. Seshadri
CTO
Kosmix Inc.

Abstract : We will trace the evolution of how people have found information on the web in the past and outline how we think this will evolve in the future. We will dwell on the consumer pain points as well as the technology/business challenges of various approaches to finding information on the web.    [slides]

Biography: Sesh is the CTO of Kosmix, a consumer internet company focused on organizing and connecting people to the information they want. Sesh has several years of experience in academia, research labs, startups and Fortune 500 companies combining technology, products and business.
Sesh was the Chief Technology Officer for Yahoo’s R&D Center in India. He is also the founder of Strand Genomics, a biotechnology company and was a researcher at Bell Labs, Lucent Technologies after serving in the faculty of the Indian Institute of Technology, Mumbai. Sesh is a graduate of the Indian Institute of Technology, Chennai and the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

Friday, December 19th, 9:00-10:30am

Raghu Ramakrishnan
Chief Scientist
Yahoo! Research

Abstract : We are in the midst of a computing revolution. As the cost of provisioning hardware and software stacks grows, and the cost of securing and administering these complex systems grows even faster, we're seeing a shift towards computing clouds. Clouds are essentially services accessed over a network, and offer developers scalable, robust infrastructure on a "pay as you go" basis, with the ability to dynamically adjust the amount of "rented" resources, and thereby, the bill. Cloud services also raise the level of abstraction at which developers program, leading to shorter development cycles, and often enable previously unrealistic computational tasks at massive scale, leading to increased innovation. For cloud service providers, there is efficiency from amortizing costs and averaging usage peaks. Internet portals like Yahoo! have long offered application services, such as email for individuals and organizations. Companies are now offering services such as storage and compute cycles, enabling higher-level services to be built on top. In this talk, I will discuss Yahoo!'s vision of cloud computing, and describe some of the key initiatives.    [slides]

Biography: Raghu Ramakrishnan is Chief Scientist for Audience and Cloud Computing at Yahoo!, and is a Research Fellow, heading the Community Systems area in Yahoo! Research. He is Professor of Computer Sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (on leave), and was founder and CTO of QUIQ, a company that pioneered question-answering communities, powering Ask Jeeves' AnswerPoint as well as customer-support for companies such as Compaq. Ramakrishnan’s research is in the area of database systems, with a focus on data mining, query optimization, and web-scale data management, and has influenced query optimization in commercial database systems and the design of window functions in SQL:1999. His paper on the Birch clustering algorithm received the SIGMOD 10-Year Test-of-Time award, and he has written the widely-used text "Database Management Systems" (with Johannes Gehrke). He is Chair of ACM SIGMOD, on the Board of Directors of ACM SIGKDD and the Board of Trustees of the VLDB Endowment, and has served as editor-in-chief of the Journal of Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery, associate editor of ACM Transactions on Database Systems, and the Database area editor of the Journal of Logic Programming. Ramakrishnan is a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), and has received several awards, including the ACM SIGKDD Innovations Award, the ACM SIGMOD Contributions Award, a Distinguished Alumnus Award from IIT Madras, a Packard Foundation Fellowship in Science and Engineering, and an NSF Presidential Young Investigator Award.