May 12, 2017
I think we need to take a hard look at approximate query processing. Don’t get me wrong. The vision of approximate query processing is indeed compelling. In the age of Big Data, the ability to answer analytic queries “approximately”, but at a fraction of the cost of executing the query in the traditional way, is […]
Read moreApril 27, 2017
Google has recently announced that its flagship wide-area database named Spanner has been made available on the Google Cloud. Google Spanner is the next generation globally-distributed database built inside Google and announced to the world through the paper published in OSDI 2012 [1]. This article explores the implication of Google Spanner, in particular to the […]
Read moreFebruary 9, 2017
The big data era (now more than a decade old) ushered in dramatic shift in mentality whereby enterprises increased their appetite for making “data-driven” decisions. To a large extent, most enterprises have gotten very good at collecting data. Now, the next big challenge is to unlock non-trivial insights that are hidden in that data. There […]
Read moreApril 10, 2016
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 […]
Read moreFebruary 18, 2016
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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