18th Italian Symposium on Advanced Database Systems

June 20th - 23rd 2010, Rimini, Italy

Invited Speakers

CourseRank: A Social Site for Academic Course Planning and Evaluation

Hector Garcia-Molina, Stanford University, CA

CourseRank is a course planning tool we have developed for Stanford students, and is already in use by most undergraduates. In this talk I will give an overview of CourseRank, and some of the research that has gone into its recommendation engine, its requirements checking engine, and its browsing interface.

About the Speaker

Hector Garcia-Molina is the Leonard Bosack and Sandra Lerner Professor in the Departments of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at Stanford University, Stanford, California. He was the chairman of the Computer Science Department from January 2001 to December 2004. From 1997 to 2001 he was a member the President's Information Technology Advisory Committee (PITAC). From August 1994 to December 1997 he was the Director of the Computer Systems Laboratory at Stanford. From 1979 to 1991 he was on the faculty of the Computer Science Department at Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey. His research interests include distributed computing systems, digital libraries and database systems. He received a BS in electrical engineering from the Instituto Tecnologico de Monterrey, Mexico, in 1974. From Stanford University, Stanford, California, he received in 1975 a MS in electrical engineering and a PhD in computer science in 1979. He holds an honorary PhD from ETH Zurich (2007). Garcia-Molina is a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; is a member of the National Academy of Engineering; received the 1999 ACM SIGMOD Innovations Award; is a Venture Advisor for Onset Ventures, and is a member of the Board of Directors of Oracle.

Data Management in the Cloud

Amr El Abbadi, University of California, CA

The challenge of building consistent, available and scalable data management systems capable of serving petabytes of data for millions of users has confronted the data management research community as well as large internet enterprises. Recently, Cloud computing has emerged as a pervasive platform for deploying scalable and highly available Internet applications. With the growing scale of these applications and the data associated with them, scalable data management systems form a crucial part of the cloud infrastructure. To facilitate supporting such data-driven applications to the cloud: elasticity, scalability, fault-tolerance, and self-manageability are fundamental requirements for data management systems driving such applications. Current proposed solutions to scalable data management, driven primarily by prevalent application requirements, limit consistent access to only the granularity of single objects, rows, or keys, thereby trading off consistency for high scalability and availability. In this talk, we analyze the design choices that allowed modern scalable data management systems to achieve orders of magnitude higher levels of scalability compared to traditional databases. We then highlight some basic principles for designing systems that provide scalable and consistent data management as a service in the cloud, and discuss some practical alternative and ramifications.

About the Speaker

Amr El Abbadi is currently Professor and Chair of the Computer Science Department at University of California, Santa Barbara. He received his B. Eng. in Computer Science from Alexandria University, Egypt, and received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Cornell University in August 1987. He has spent extended visits to the University of Campinas in Brazil, IBM Almaden Research Center, the Swedish Institute of Computer Science in Stockholm, Sweden and at IRISA at the University of Rennes in France. In 2002-03, Prof. El Abbadi was director of the University of California, Education Abroad Center at the American University in Cairo. He has served as area editor for Information Systems: An International Journal, an editor of Information Processing Letters (IPL), Associate editor of the Bulletin of the Technical Committee on Data Engineering and is currently an editor for The VLDB Journal. He was Vice Chair of the 1999 International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems, Vice Chair for the International Conference on Data Engineering 2002, group leader for the International Conference on Management of Data (SIGMOD) 2005, the Americas Program Chair for the 2000 International Conference on Very Large Data Bases (VLDB), and PC co-Chair for SIGSPATIAL GIS 2010. He has also served as a board member of the VLDB Endowment from 2002—2008 and was an editor of the Encyclopedia of Database Systems. In 2007, Prof. El Abbadi received the UCSB Senate Outstanding Mentorship Award for his excellence in mentoring graduate students. He has published over 250 articles in databases and distribute systems.