Wednesday, 13:30 – 15:00:

Panel: 40 Years of VLDB: Our Heritage and our Future

Panelists:

• Phil Bernstein, Microsoft Research
• Michael Brodie, MIT, retired Chief Scientist Verizon IT
• Don Chamberlin, retired IBM Fellow
• Alfons Kemper, Technical University Munich
• Michael Stonebraker, MIT and serial entrepreneur

Panel Moderator: Pat Selinger, Paradata

Abstract:
In this panel, we will sweep across 40 years of VLDB with stories and anecdotes about people and technology, the amazing adoption of relational databases, what we focused on and thought important, compared to what really turned out to be important? What was it like to be in on the birth of the field? When did we realize that this could be something big? What problems were missed or ignored and caused us regrets? Given your expertise and knowledge of the field, what predictions do you have for VLDB opportunities in the future?

The audience should expect to find something interesting not only to those who traveled this journey with us but also to attendees who weren’t there at the time and may not have even been born. This is a rare opportunity for you to hear from the people who were there and hear their perspectives on the future.

Panelist
Phil Bernstein

Bio
Philip A. Bernstein is a Distinguished Scientist at Microsoft Research. Over the past 35 years, he has been a product architect at Microsoft and Digital Equipment Corp., a professor at Harvard University and Wang Institute of Graduate Studies, and a VP Software at Sequoia Systems. He has published over 150 papers and two books on the theory and implementation of database systems, especially on transaction processing and metadata management. His latest work focuses on database systems and object-oriented middleware for distributed computing, and integration of heterogeneous data in the enterprise and on the web. He is an ACM Fellow, a winner of the ACM SIGMOD Innovations Award, and a member of the National Academy of Engineering. He received a B.S. from Cornell and M.Sc. and Ph.D. from University of Toronto. His home page is: http://research.microsoft.com/~philbe

Panelist
Michael Brodie

Bio
Dr. Brodie has over 40 years experience in research and industrial practice in databases, distributed systems, integration, artificial intelligence, and multi-disciplinary problem solving. He is concerned with the Big Picture aspects of information ecosystems including business, economic, social, application, and technical. Dr. Brodie is a Research Scientist, Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; advises startups; serves on Advisory Boards of national and international research organizations; and is an adjunct professor at the National University of Ireland, Galway and at the University of Technology, Sydney. For over 20 years he served as Chief Scientist of IT, Verizon, a Fortune 15 company, responsible for advanced technologies, architectures, and methodologies for IT strategies and for guiding industrial scale deployments of emerging technologies. His current research and applied interests include Big Data, Data Science, data curation at scale and a related start up Tamr.com. He has served on several National Academy of Science committees. Dr. Brodie holds a PhD in Databases from the University of Toronto 
and a Doctor of Science (honoris causa) from the National University of Ireland.

Panelist
Don Chamberlin

Bio
Don Chamberlin is co-inventor, with Ray Boyce, of SQL, the world’s most widely-used database query language. He was also one of the managers of System R, the IBM research project that produced the first implementation of SQL. More recently, Don represented IBM on the W3C working group that developed XQuery, a query language for XML data. Don received his B.S. degree from Harvey Mudd College and his Ph.D. from Stanford University. He has been named a Fellow of IBM, ACM, IEEE, and the Computer History Museum, and has received the ACM Software Systems Award and the SIGMOD Innovations Award. For several years Don has contributed problems to the annual ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest. He has also served as an adjunct professor of computer science at University of California, Santa Cruz, and at Santa Clara University. Don is currently retired and is dividing his time among learning, traveling, volunteer activities, and enjoying his grandchildren.

Panelist
Alfons Kemper

Bio
Alfons Kemper’s research field is database systems engineering. He explores ways to optimize information systems for operational and scientific applications as a way to combat the data explosion. His main areas of interest are optimization concepts for distributed information structures, data integration methods and, in particular, main memory-based database systems. Together with his colleague Thomas Neumann he leads the HyPer main-memory database project (hyper-db.com) at Technische Universität München. HyPer is one of the first hybrid database systems that offers high-performance OLTP as well as OLAP in parallel on the same database state.

After studying computer science at the University of Dortmund from 1977 to 1980, he moved to the University of Southern California, Los Angeles. While there, he obtained his Master of Science and doctorate. Upon his return to Germany, he completed his lecturer qualification at the University of Karlsruhe. His first professorship was conferred by RWTH Aachen. After many years as Director of the Chair of Database Systems at the University of Passau, TUM offered him a position in 2004. From 2006 to 2010, he was Dean of the Department of Informatics at TUM. His textbook on database systems, published by deGruyter and now in its 10th edition, is a best-seller in German-speaking countries and is used in most universities and colleges.

Panelist
Michael Stonebraker

Bio
Dr. Stonebraker has been a pioneer of data base research and technology for more than a quarter of a century. He was the main architect of the INGRES relational DBMS, and the object-relational DBMS, POSTGRES. These prototypes were developed at the University of California at Berkeley where Stonebraker was a Professor of Computer Science for twenty five years. More recently at M.I.T. he was a co-architect of the Aurora/Borealis stream processing engine, the C-Store column-oriented DBMS, the H-Store transaction processing engine, the SciDB array DBMS, and the Data Tamer data curation system. Presently he serves as Chief Technology Officer of Paradigm4 and Tamr, Inc.

Professor Stonebraker was awarded the ACM System Software Award in 1992 for his work on INGRES. Additionally, he was awarded the first annual SIGMOD Innovation award in 1994, and was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 1997. He was awarded the IEEE John Von Neumann award in 2005, and is presently an Adjunct Professor of Computer Science at M.I.T, where he is co-director of the Intel Science and Technology Center focused on big data.

Panel Moderator
Pat Selinger

Bio
Dr. Pat Selinger is the Chief Technology Officer at Paradata (Paradata.io) where she is working on challenging problems in data harmonization, curation, provenance, and entity resolution. Prior to joining Paradata, she worked at IBM Research. She is a world-renowned pioneer in relational database management and inventor of the technique of cost-based query. She was a key member of the original System R team that created the first relational database research prototype. She also established and led IBM’s Database Technology Institute, considered one of the most successful examples of a fast technology pipeline from research to development and personally has technical contributions in the areas of database optimization, data parallelism, distributed data, and unstructured data management. Dr. Selinger was appointed an IBM Fellow in 1994 and is an ACM Fellow, a member of the National Academy of Engineering, and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Dr. Selinger has also received the ACM Systems Software Award for her work on System R and has received the SIGMOD Innovation Award.

Thursday, 13:30 – 15:00:

Panel: "Designing for Interaction: Broadening our View of Working with Data”

Panelists:

• Azza Abouzied, NYU-AD
• Adam Marcus, Unlimited Labs
• Arnab Nandi, Ohio State University
• Eugene Wu, Columbia University

Panel Moderator: Joseph M. Hellerstein, UC Berkeley

Abstract:
Traditionally, databases and data visualization tools were narrowly focused on individual query-response interactions. This perspective on the way people work with data seems increasingly myopic as time passes. Today, much of the time people spend working with data involves iterative and interactive exploration, transformation and analysis—often via inefficient use of outmoded tools and interaction models. Thoughtful designs for the future need to consider user behaviors and desires in a far broader scope than the narrow query-response paradigm of the past.

In this panel, a number of leading young technologists working in this area will take a long view of the future of interacting with data, and discuss exploratory paths to get us from here to there.

Panelist
Azza Abouzied

Bio
Azza Abouzied's research work focuses on designing intuitive data querying tools. Today’s technologies are helping people collect and produce data at phenomenal rates. Despite the abundance of data, it remains largely inaccessible due to the skill required to explore, query and analyze it in a non-trivial fashion. While many users know exactly what they are looking for, they have trouble expressing sophisticated queries in interfaces that require knowledge of a programming language or a query language. Azza designs novel interfaces, such as example-driven query tools, that simplify data querying and analysis. Her research work combines techniques from various research fields such as UI-design, machine learning and databases. Azza Abouzied received her doctoral degree from Yale in 2013. She spent a year as a visiting scholar at UC Berkeley. She is also one of the co-founders of Hadapt – a Big Data analytics platform.

Panelist
Adam Marcus

Bio
Adam just cofounded Unlimited Labs, a company dedicated to the future of work. Prior to that, Adam led the data team at Locu, a startup that was acquired by GoDaddy. He completed his Ph.D. in computer science at MIT in 2012, where his dissertation was on database systems and human computation. Adam is a recipient of the NSF and NDSEG fellowships, and has previously worked at ITA, Google, IBM, and FactSet. In his free time, Adam builds course content to get people excited about data and programming.

Panelist
Arnab Nandi

Bio
Arnab's research is in the area of database systems, focusing on challenges in big data analytics and interactive query interfaces. The goal of his group is to empower humans to effectively interact with data. This involves solving problems that span the areas of databases, visualization, human-computer interaction, and information retrieval.

Arnab is also a founder of The STEAM Factory, a collaborative interdisciplinary research and public outreach initiative, and faculty director of the OSU Hackathon. Arnab is a recipient of the NSF CAREER Award, a Google Faculty Research Award, and a Yahoo! PhD Fellowship.

Panelist
Eugene Wu

Bio
Eugene is broadly interested in technologies that help users play with their data. His goal is for users at all technical levels to effectively and quickly make sense of their information. He is interested in solutions that ultimately improve the interface between users and data, and techniques borrows from fields such as data management, systems, crowd sourcing, visualization, and HCI.

Eugene is starting at Columbia University in Fall of 2015.

Panel Moderator
Joseph M. Hellerstein

Bio
Joe is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of California, Berkeley, whose work focuses on data-centric systems and the way they drive computing. He is an ACM Fellow, an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow and the recipient of three SIGMOD “Test of Time” awards for his research. In 2010, Fortune Magazine included him in their list of 50 smartest people in technology , and MIT’s Technology Review magazine included his work on their TR10 list of the 10 technologies “most likely to change our world”.

Joe is also the co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer of Trifacta, a software vendor providing intelligent interactive solutions to the messy problems of wrangling data. He serves on the technical advisory boards of a number of computing and Internet companies including EMC, SurveyMonkey, Captricity, and Dato, and previously served as the Director of Intel Research, Berkeley.