Keynote Talks



Keynotes #1:

Semantics on the Web: How do we get there?

Raghu Ramakrishnan, Chief Scientist for Audience and Cloud Computing, Yahoo!
Date: 5/18/2009 Monday
Location: Socrates Hall
Session Chair: Meng-Chang Chen, Academia Sinica, Taiwan
Abstract
It is becoming increasingly clear that the next generation of web search and advertising will rely on a deeper understanding of user intent and task modeling, and a correspondingly richer interpretation of content on the web. This should also facilitate better selection and presentation of results on mobile devices. How we get there, in particular, how we understand web content in richer terms than bags of words and links, is a wide open and fascinating question. I will discuss some of the options here, and look closely at the role that information extraction can play.

Raghu Ramakrishnan is Chief Scientist for Audience and Cloud Computing at Yahoo!, and is a Research Fellow, heading the Web Information Management group 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.

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Keynotes #2:

Cloud Computing and the Future of Internet Services

Wei-Ying Ma, Assistant Managing Director at Microsoft Research Asia
Date: 5/19/2009 Tuesday
Location: Socrates Hall
Session Chair: Chung-Ta King, NTHU, Taiwan
Abstract
A principal aspiration of cloud computing is to create an Internet-based platform that facilitates the development of Web-scale services. By presenting this platform and infrastructure (including datacenters) as a service for developers, together with cloud-based software and data as a service for users, cloud computing promises to "level the playing field" such that small start-up ventures can directly compete with more established Internet companies. In this talk, I will share my thoughts on how this emerging trend could change the landscape of the Internet as we know it, and discuss the opportunities and technical challenges it raises from the perspective of Web data management.

Dr. Wei-Ying Ma Dr. Wei-Ying Ma is an Assistant Managing Director at Microsoft Research Asia where he oversees multiple research groups including Web Search and Data Mining, Natural Language Computing, and Human Computer Interaction. Over the past few years, his team has made numerous key technology transfers to Microsoft's search and online service business unit. His team has also generated a great number of publications at SIGIR and WWW, representing 5-10% of full papers each year in these top conferences. Under his leadership, his team is now widely recognized as one of the global powerhouses in research related to web search, data mining, and multimedia information retrieval. Wei-Ying currently serves on the editorial boards of ACM Transactions on Information System (TOIS) and ACM/Springer Multimedia Systems Journal. He was the program co-chair of the 17th International World Wide Web Conference (WWW) 2008, program co-chair of the Pacific Rim Conference on Multimedia (PCM) 2007, and general co-chair of the Asia Information Retrieval Symposium (AIRS) 2008. He will be the general co-chair of SIGIR 2011.

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Keynotes #3:

Location, Location, Location

Christian S. Jensen, Center for Data-Intensive Systems Department of Computer Science, Aalborg University
Date: 5/20/2009 Wednesday
Location: Socrates Hall
Session Chair: Ralf H. Guting, University of Hagen, Germany
Abstract
The Internet is going mobile, and indications are that on a global scale, the mobile Internet will soon be "bigger" than the conventional Internet. Due to aspects such as user mobility, much more varied use situations, and the form factor of mobile devices, context awareness is important on the mobile Internet. Focusing on aspects of geo-spatial context awareness, this talk covers research that aims to build cloud computing infrastructure for mobile data management. A key research goal is to enable sites that allow users to easily create, deploy, and share geo-spatial services.

Christian S. Jensen is a Professor of Computer Science at Aalborg University, Denmark. His research concerns data management and spans semantics, modeling, and indexing and query processing. During the past decade, his focus has been on spatio-temporal data management. He is an IEEE Fellow and a member of the Danish Academy of Technical Sciences, the EDBT Endowment, the VLDB Endowment's Board of Trustees, and ERCIM's Board of Directors. He received Ib Henriksen's Research Award 2001 for his research in mainly temporal data management and Telenor's Nordic Research Award 2002 for his research in mobile services.
He is an editor-in-chief of The VLDB Journal and has served on the editorial boards of ACM TODS, IEEE TKDE, and the IEEE Data Engineering Bulletin. He was PC chair or co-chair for SSTD 2001, EDBT 2002, VLDB 2005, MobiDE 2006, MDM 2007, DMSN 2008, and TIME 2008.
He is currently on sabbatical at Google Inc., Mountain View, where he is part of the structured data research group headed by Alon Halevy.

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