Abstract
Big Data has become a hot topic in the last few years in both industry and the research community. For the most part, these developments were initially triggered by the requirements of Web 2.0 companies. Both technical and non-technical issues have continued to fuel the rapid pace of developments in the Big Data space. Open source and non-traditional software entities have played key roles in the latter. As it always happens with any emerging technology, there is a fair amount of hype that accompanies the work being done in the name of Big Data. The set of clear-cut distinctions that were made initially between Big Data systems and traditional database management systems are being blurred as the needs of the broader set of (¡°real world¡±) users and developers have come into sharper focus in the last couple of years. In this panel, we will discuss and debate the developments in Big Data and try to distill reality from the hype!

Moderator:
C. Mohan (IBM Almaden Research Center)

Panelists:
Michael Carey (University of California at Irvine), Surajit Chaudhuri (Microsoft), Ashish Gupta (Google), Wolfgang Lehner (Technical University of Dresden) , Christopher Re (Stanford University) and Gera Shegalov (Twitter)

Bio
Dr. C. Mohan has been an IBM researcher for 32 years in the information management area, impacting numerous IBM and non-IBM products, the research and academic communities, and standards, especially with his invention of the ARIES family of locking and recovery algorithms, and the Presumed Abort commit protocol. This IBM, ACM and IEEE Fellow has also served as the IBM India Chief Scientist. In addition to receiving the ACM SIGMOD Innovation Award, the VLDB 10 Year Best Paper Award and numerous IBM awards, he has been elected to the US and Indian National Academies of Engineering, and has been named an IBM Master Inventor. This distinguished alumnus of IIT Madras received his PhD at the University of Texas at Austin. He is an inventor of 40 patents. He has served on the advisory board of IEEE Spectrum and on the IBM Software Group Architecture Board¡¯s Council. Mohan is a frequent speaker in North America, Western Europe and India, and has given talks in 40 countries. More information can be found in his home page at http://bit.ly/CMohan

Michael J. Carey is a Bren Professor of Information and Computer Sciences at UC Irvine. Before joining UCI in 2008, Carey worked at BEA Systems for seven years and led the development of BEA's AquaLogic Data Services Platform product for virtual data integration. He also spent a dozen years teaching at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, five years at the IBM Almaden Research Center working on object-relational databases, and a year and a half at e-commerce platform startup Propel Software during the infamous 2000-2001 Internet bubble. Carey is an ACM Fellow, a member of the National Academy of Engineering, and a recipient of the ACM SIGMOD E.F. Codd Innovations Award. His current interests all center around data-intensive computing and scalable data management (a.k.a. Big Data). He is currently leading the UC Irvine + UC Riverside AsterixDB open source BDMS project.

Surajit Chaudhuri is a Distinguished Scientist at Microsoft Research. His current areas of interest are enterprise data analytics, self-manageability and multi-tenant technology for cloud database services. Working with his colleagues in Microsoft Research and the Microsoft SQL Server team, he helped incorporate the Index Tuning Wizard - and subsequently Database Engine Tuning Advisor - into Microsoft SQL Server. He initiated a project on data cleaning at Microsoft Research whose technology now ships in Microsoft SQL Server. Surajit represents Microsoft Research in the Senior Leadership team of Microsoft Cloud and Enterprise group. He is an ACM Fellow, a recipient of the ACM SIGMOD Edgar F. Codd Innovations Award, ACM SIGMOD Contributions Award, a VLDB 10 year Best Paper Award, and an IEEE Data Engineering Influential Paper Award. He was the Program Committee Chair for ACM SIGMOD 2006, a Co-Chair of ACM SIGKDD 1999 & ACM SOCC 2010, and has served on the editorial boards of ACM TODS and IEEE TKDE. Surajit received his Ph.D. from Stanford University and B.Tech from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur.

Ashish Gupta is a Distinguished Software Engineer at Google. Ashish works in the Ads Backend Infrastructure group, where he works on numerous very large scale distributed system problems, including continuous event processing, peta-byte scale storage engines, big data query processing, experiment analysis, etc. Ashish holds a Masters in Computer Science from University of Texas at Austin and did his Bachelors in Computer Science from IIT Delhi.

Wolfgang Lehner is full professor and head of the database technology group at the TU Dresden, Germany. His research is dedicated to the combination of database system architecture with statistical algorithms specifically looking at crosscutting aspects from algorithms down to hardware-related aspects in main-memory centric settings. He is part of TU Dresden's excellence cluster with research topics in energy-aware scheduling, resilient data structures on unreliable hardware, and orchestration wildly heterogeneous systems; he is also a principal investigator of Germany's national "Competence Center for Scalable Data Services and Solutions" (ScaDS); For many years, Wolfgang maintains a close research relationship with the SAP HANA development team. He is an elected member of the VLDB Endowment, serves on the review board of the German Research Foundation (DFG) and is a newly elected member of the Academy of Europe.

Christopher (Chris) Re is an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science at Stanford University. The goal of his work is to enable users and developers to build applications that more deeply understand and exploit data. Chris received his PhD from the University of Washington in Seattle under the supervision of Dan Suciu. For his PhD work in probabilistic data management, Chris received the SIGMOD 2010 Jim Gray Dissertation Award. Chris's papers have received four best-paper or best-of-conference citations, including best paper in PODS 2012, best-of-conference in PODS 2010 twice, and one best-of-conference in ICDE 2009. Chris received an NSF CAREER Award in 2011 and an Alfred P. Sloan fellowship in 2013.

German "Gera" Shegalov received Masters and PhD in Computer Science from Saarland University in Saarbruecken, Germany. Gera developed the first version of the SQL Sever-based transaction-time database project ImmortalDB as an intern at Microsoft Research. Gera's PhD thesis developed the formal models and provided the model checking proofs for the application recovery Interaction Contracts (IC) framework by Lomet and Weikum. He has also implemented the IC framework for PHP-based web services where the system restores and replays the state of browsers and distributed web service components in an exactly-once manner.
Gera's career as a Software Engineer included Oracle Database HA Group and Oracle Java Platform Group where he worked among other things on Persistence, RPC layer, and XA-2PC optimization for JMS helping Oracle win the SPECjAppServer benchmark. For the past ~3 years, Gera has worked in Hadoop space. First with MapR Technologies where he worked on shuffle and sort optimizations in MapReduce, and lately at Twitter where he helps one of the biggest Hadoop installations in the world crunch 30K+ analytics jobs and petabytes of data daily.