August 27, 2014
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 specific tasks. Today, many other platforms that expect workers with different expertise exist. Among them, […]
Read moreJune 21, 2014
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 by web search engines and database systems alike, and towards support for human intelligence amplification and information understanding. […]
Read moreApril 10, 2014
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 then-Professor Goetz Graefe at the Oregon […]
Read moreFebruary 24, 2014
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 database conferences. For example, transactions and data streams are […]
Read moreDecember 11, 2013
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 structured data of some […]
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