Felix Naumann
April 10, 2016
Reflections of a Data Skeptic
In the 21st century, our everyday lives are shaped by what machines tell us to do. Big data and their application to economy, policy, and our social life act as behavioral equalizers. And this they do under the assumption of optimization in both subtle and open ways. In fact, they are pushing individuals into uniform […]
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Letizia Tanca
February 18, 2016
Wisdom: a “double V” for Big Data
Some months ago, I found an exciting piece of news on the Web: a top manager proclaimed [1]: “If the most important thing you offer is data, you are in trouble. (….) Algorithms is where the real value lies. Algorithms define action.” How interesting! It seems to suggest that everybody, including computer scientists and in […]
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Serge Abiteboul and Julia Stoyanovich
November 20, 2015
Data, Responsibly
(This blog post is an extended version of an October 12, 2015 Le Monde op-ed article (in French)) Our society is increasingly relying on algorithms in all aspects of its operation. We trust algorithms not only to help carry out routine tasks, such as accounting and automatic manufacturing, but also to make decisions on our […]
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Alon Halevy
September 20, 2015
A Decade at Google
I recently celebrated my 10th anniversary at Google and decided to take the opportunity to share some of my reflections on the past decade. Prior to joining Google, I was on the faculty of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington, where I founded the database research group that is […]
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Michael Stonebraker
July 13, 2015
The Case for Polystores
A Federated DBMS is a middleware offering that runs on top of (perhaps several) local DBMSs and presents a seamless interface to disparate systems with (perhaps) independently constructed DBMS schemas. Systems in this category include R*, Ingres*, Garlic, IBM’s Information Integrator, and several others. These offerings should be contrasted to parallel DBMSs, which are single […]
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