Brenda Dietrich

IBM T. J. Watson Research Center

Data Analytics Opportunities in a Smarter Planet

Abstract

New applications of computing are being enabled by instrumentation of physical entities, aggregation of data, and the analysis of the data. The resulting integration of information and control permits efficient and effective management of complex man-made systems. Examples include transportation systems, buildings, electrical grids, health care systems, governments, and supply chains. Achieving this vision requires extensive data integration and analysis, over diverse, rapidly changing, and often uncertain data. There are many challenges, requiring both new data management techniques as well as new mathematics, forcing new collaborations as the basis of the new "Data Science". Needs and opportunities will be discussed in the context of specific pilots and projects.

Brenda Dietrich is an IBM Fellow, Vice President and Chief Technology Officer for Business Analytics in IBM.  She provides technical guidance for IBM's Business Analytics software strategy and products, and provides leadership for the analytics software community within IBM. Previously she led IBM's research activities in Business Analytics and Mathematical Sciences, and supports software products and consulting in these areas. She was responsible for both basic research in computational mathematics and related fields, and the development of novel business applications based on the application of mathematical models within industry.

She has been the president of INFORMS, the worlds largest professional society for Operations Research and Management Sciences, and is an INFORMS Fellow. She serves on the Board of Trustees of SIAM.  She has served on university advisory boards for Northwestern, CMU, MIT, and UC Berkeley, and on advisory boards for NSF sponsored Math Research Institutes.  She holds more than a dozen patents, has co-authored numerous publications, and co-edited the book Mathematics of the Internet: E-Auction and Markets. She holds a BS in Mathematics from UNC and an MS and Ph.D. in OR/IE from Cornell.

Her personal research includes manufacturing scheduling, services resource management, transportation logistics, integer programming, and combinatorial duality.

Christian S. Jensen

Aarhus University

Data Management on the Spatial Web

Abstract

Due in part to the increasing mobile use of the web and the proliferation of geo-positioning, the web is fast acquiring a significant spatial aspect. Content and users are being augmented with locations that are used increasingly by location-based services. Studies suggest that each week, several billion web queries are issued that have local intent and target spatial web objects. These are points of interest with a web presence, and they thus have locations as well as textual descriptions. This development has given prominence to spatial web data management, an area ripe with new and exciting opportunities and challenges. The research community has embarked on inventing and supporting new query functionality for the spatial web.

Different kinds of spatial web queries return objects that are near a location argument and are relevant to a text argument. To support such queries, it is important to be able to rank objects according to their relevance to a query. And it is important to be able to process the queries with low latency. The talk offers an overview of key aspects of the spatial web. Based on recent results obtained by the speaker and his colleagues, the talk explores new query functionality enabled by the setting. Further, the talk offers insight into the data management techniques capable of supporting such functionality.

Christian S. Jensen is a Professor of Computer Science at Aarhus University, Denmark, and he was previously at Aalborg University for two decades. He recently spent a 1-year sabbatical at Google Inc., Mountain View. His research concerns data management and data-intensive systems, and its focus is on temporal and spatio-temporal data management. Christian is an ACM and an IEEE fellow, and he is a member of the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters and the Danish Academy of Technical Sciences. He has received several national and international awards for his research. He is currently vice-chair of ACM SIGMOD and an editor-in-chief of The VLDB Journal.

Kenan Sahin

TIAX

Challenges in economic massive content storage and management (MCSAM) in the era of
self-organizing, self expanding and self linking data clusters

Abstract

Rapid spread of social networks, global on-line shopping, post 9/11 security oriented linking of data bases and foremost the global adoption of smart phones/devices, among other phenomena, are transforming data clusters into dynamic and almost uncontrollable entities that have their own local intelligence, clients and objectives. The scale and rapidity of change is such that large scale innovations in content storage and management are urgently needed if the diseconomies of scale and complexity are to be mitigated. The field needs to reinvent itself.

Istanbul, a city that has reinvented itself many times is an excellent venue to engage in such a discussion and for me to offer suggestions and proposals that derive from personal experiences that span academia, start ups, R&D firms and Bell Labs as well my early years spent in Istanbul.

Dr. Kenan Sahin is a highly successful entrepreneur, as well as a scientist, educator and philanthropist. Born in Turkey, Sahin earned bachelors and Ph.D. degrees at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the 1960s. His doctoral research led to worldwide patents in areas relating to computer communication networks and massively parallel computation. He taught at Harvard, MIT and the University of Massachusetts before he started his own company, Kenan Systems, with $1,000 of his own money in 1982. Kenan Systems soon became the leading provider of software for billing and customer service growing to about 1,000 employees with offices across the globe. In 1999, Sahin sold his company to Lucent Technologies, but rather than resting on his laurels, he signed on with Lucent as president of the new subsidiary, and as a vice president of software technology for Bell Labs and stayed until 2001. In 2002, Dr. Sahin took over the Technology and Innovation division of Arthur D. Little company, which was the oldest technology company in the U.S. and transformed it into TIAX, a laboratory-based technology development company with headquarters in Lexington, Massachusetts and offices in both Northern and Southern California. As Sahin's business ventures have prospered, he has contributed generously to education. Sahin has published widely on the technology and innovation. Kenan was chosen by the World Economic Forum as one of its 40 Technology Pioneers for 2003 and received the New England Business and Technology's "Circle of Excellence" award in 2004. In 2006, he was given the Golden Door Award by the International Institute of Boston and in 2010 the Ellis Island Medal of Honor which award is recognized by the US Congress.

Kenan serves, or has served on, numerous non-profit boards, including those of MIT (for whom he is a life member) on the External Advisory Board of MIT's Energy Initiative, the Council on Competitiveness (COC), Argonne National Laboratory, the Boston Museum of Science, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, and Boston Symphony. He is in constant demand as a lecturer at universities and as a speaker at industry conferences, where he is well known for his energy, insight, charisma and down-to-earth style.