Catching the heartbeat of the data management community: perspectives on exciting and controversial topics, from and for the ACM SIGMOD community.
Like all computer science and engineering departments, at Arizona State University (ASU), we regularly re-assess the impacts of our research and educational programs based on feedback from users of the technologies we develop and companies that hire our graduates. Last January, as part of the most…
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Figure 1 shows a portion of a relational table contained in a real, large information system. The table concerns the customers of an organization, where each row stores data about a single customer. The first column contains her code (if the code is negative, then the record refers to a special…
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Got your attention? Now that I have it, I would like to take a few minutes to discuss the role of limited attention and information overload in science. Attentive acts such as reading a scientific paper (or a tweet), answering an email, or watching a video require mental effort, and since the human…
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Big Data should be Interesting Data! There are various definitions of Big Data; most center around a number of V’s like volume, velocity, variety, veracity – in short: interesting data (interesting in at least one aspect). However, when you look into research papers on Big Data, in SIGMOD, VLDB, or…
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Fifty years ago a small team working to automate the business processes of the General Electric Low Voltage Switch Gear Department in Philadelphia built the first functioning prototype of a database management system. The Integrated Data Store was designed by Charles W. Bachman, who later won the…
Read more…As data is becoming increasingly more important in our society, there are many successful companies doing data-related businesses. This field grows so fast that many new startups are launched with the goal to become the “next Google.” This trend also provides a lot of entrepreneurship opportunities…
Read more…Big Data is the buzzword in the database community these days. Two of the first three blog entries of the SIGMOD blog are on Big Data. There was a plenary research session with invited talks at the 2012 SIGMOD Conference and there will be a panel at the 2012 VLDB Conference. Probably, everything…
Read more…Computer science publication culture and practices has become an active discussion topic. Moshe Vardi has written a number of editorials in Communications of ACM on the topic that can be found here and here, and these have generated considerable discussion. The conversation on this issue has been…
Read more…I was recently approached by an entrepreneur who had an interesting way to correlate short term performance of a stock with news reports about the stock. Needless to say, there are many places from which one can get the news, and what results one gets from this sort of analysis does depend on the…
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tl;dr: MADlib is an open-source library of scalable in-database algorithms for machine learning, statistics and other analytic tasks. MADlib is supported with people-power from Greenplum; researchers at Berkeley, Florida and Wisconsin are also contributing. The project recently released a MADlib…
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