Catching the heartbeat of the data management community: perspectives on exciting and controversial topics, from and for the ACM SIGMOD community.
Graph data management has seen a resurgence in recent years, because of an increasing realization that querying and reasoning about the structure of the interconnections between entities can lead to interesting and deep insights into a variety of phenomena. The application domains where graph or…
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As Thanksgiving approaches, it may feel like everyone else has so much more to be thankful for. Just check your Facebook, Twitter or Instagram: your friends seem to dine at finer restaurants, take more exotic vacations, and attend more exciting parties. Research suggests this is not simply a matter…
Read more…Most professional fields, whether in business or academia, rely on data and have done so for centuries. In the digital age and with the emergence of Big Data, this dependency is growing dramatically – perhaps out of proportion to its current value given the concepts, tools, and techniques presently…
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Crowdsourcing is a powerful paradigm that democratizes the creation, collection, analysis, curation, and dissemination of data, contributed by millions of individuals, who are called workers. Early crowdsourcing platforms in the context of citizen reporting and citizen sciences were dedicated to…
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Exploratory search has gained prominence in recent years. There is an increased interest from several scientific communities, from the information retrieval and database to human-computer interaction and visualization communities, in moving beyond the traditional query-browse-refine model supported…
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Is Query Optimization a “solved” problem? If not, are we attacking the “right” problems? How should we identify the “right” problems to solve? I asked these same questions almost exactly 25 years ago, in an extended abstract for a Workshop on Database Query Optimization that was organized by the…
Read more…After hanging out exclusively with the database community for 35+ years, I’ve recently become more involved with the systems research community. I have a few observations and recommendations to share.Much of the work published in systems conferences covers topics that would have a natural home in…
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In 2011, I was traveling on the Kolkata Metro when I made an interesting observation. Nearly every passenger around me was using a computing device of some sort. Some were playing with their smartphones, some with their tablets, some listening to music on their iPod Touches. Each was a consumer of…
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“Both theoretical and empirical research may be unnecessarily complicated by failure to recognize the effects of heterogeneity” – Vaupel & Yashin Big Data is daily topic of conversation among data analysts, with much said and written about its promises and pitfalls. The issue of heterogeneity,…
Read more…The title I chose is triggered by the lack of concern shown by computer scientists when public disclosures that companies like Apple, Google, HP own pay amazingly low taxes. These companies are derided in the press [look here for references]. The critiques provide little background, and often just…
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