Speaker: Johannes Gehrke, Cornell
Abstract:
There are many web applications that require users to coordinate and communicate. Friends want to coordinate travel plans, students want to jointly enroll in the same set of courses, and busy professionals want to coordinate their schedules. These tasks are difficult to program using existing abstractions provided by database systems since they all require some type of coordination between users. However, this type of information flow is fundamentally incompatible with classical isolation in database transactions. In this talk, I will argue that it is time to look beyond isolation towards principled and elegant abstractions that allow for communication and coordination between some notion of (suitably generalized) transactions. This new area of declarative data-driven coordination is motivated by many novel applications and is full of challenging research problems. This talk describes joint work with Gabriel Bender, Nitin Gupta, Christoph Koch, Lucja Kot, Milos Nikolic, and Sudip Roy.
Bio:
Johannes Gehrke is the Tisch University Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Cornell University. Johannes' research interests are in the areas of database systems, data mining, and data privacy. Johannes has received a National Science Foundation Career Award, an Arthur P. Sloan Fellowship, an IBM Faculty Award, the Cornell College of Engineering James and Mary Tien Excellence in Teaching Award, the Cornell University Provost's Award for Distinguished Scholarship, a Humboldt Research Award from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the 2011 IEEE Computer Society Technical Achievement Award, and the 2011 Blavatnik Award for Young Scientists from the New York Academy of Sciences. He is the author of numerous publications on data mining and database systems, and he co-authored the undergraduate textbook Database Management Systems (McGrawHill (2002), currently in its third edition), used at universities all over the world. Johannes is also an Adjunct Professor at the University of Tromso in Norway. From 2007 to 2008, he was Chief Scientist at FAST, a Microsoft subsidiary.