Alan J. Perlis Lecture Series
April 4, 2008
4:00 p.m., AKW 200

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Speaker: Raghu Ramakrishnan, Yahoo!
Title: The Next Generation of Web Data Management

Abstract: The Web is no longer a static repository of documents. How is the Web evolving as an information source, and how does this affect the future of information discovery? What are the implications of the rapid growth of social networks? How does the emergence of the Web as a delivery channel for services affect the future of software? Technically, these trends have given rise to a new wave of challenges. I will present some of the ongoing work at Yahoo! on information extraction and community information management (the PSOX project), and massively distributed, hosted storage and computing platforms (the PNUTS/Sherpa project).

Bio: Raghu Ramakrishnan is Chief Scientist for Audience and Research Fellow at Yahoo!, and heads the Community Systems Group in Yahoo! Research. He is on leave from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he is Professor of Computer Sciences, and was founder and CTO of QUIQ, a company that pioneered question-answering communities, powering Ask Jeeves' AnswerPoint as well as customer-support for companies such as Compaq. His research has influenced query optimization in commercial database systems, and the design of window functions in SQL:1999. His paper on the Birch clustering algorithm received the SIGMOD 10-Year Test-of-Time award, and he has written the widely-used text "Database Management Systems" (with Johannes Gehrke). He is Chair of ACM SIGMOD, on the Board of Directors of ACM SIGKDD and the Board of Trustees of the VLDB Endowment, and has served as editor-in-chief of the Journal of Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery, associate editor of ACM Transactions on Database Systems, and the Database area editor of the Journal of Logic Programming. Dr. Ramakrishnan is an ACM Fellow, an IEEE Fellow, and has received several awards, including a Distinguished Alumnus Award from IIT Madras, a Packard Foundation Fellowship, an NSF Presidential Young Investigator Award, and an ACM SIGMOD Contributions Award.