Breaking the Chains: On Declarative Data Analysis and Data Independence in the Big Data Era

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Date:           Friday, 16 January 2015

Time:           11:00am - 12 noon

Venue:          Lecture Theatre H (near lifts 27/28), HKUST
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                *** Talk 1 ***
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Speaker:        Professor Volker MARKL
                Technische Universität Berlin (TU Berlin)

Title:          "Breaking the Chains: On Declarative Data Analysis and
                 Data Independence in the Big Data Era"

Abstract:

Data management research, systems, and technologies have drastically
improved the availability of data analysis capabilities, particularly for
non-experts, due in part to low-entry barriers and reduced ownership costs
(e.g., for data management infrastructures and applications). Major
reasons for the widespread success of database systems and today's
multi-billion dollar data management market include data independence,
separating physical representation and storage from the actual
information, and declarative languages, separating the program
specification from its intended execution environment. In contrast,
today's big data solutions do not offer data independence and declarative
specification. As a result, big data technologies are mostly employed in
newly-established companies with IT-savvy employees or in large
well-established companies with big IT departments. We argue that current
big data solutions will continue to fall short of widespread adoption, due
to usability problems, despite the fact that in-situ data analytics
technologies achieve a good degree of schema independence. In particular,
we consider the lack of a declarative specification to be a major
roadblock, contributing to the scarcity in available data scientists
available and limiting the application of big data to the IT-savvy
industries. In particular, data scientists currently have to spend a lot
of time on tuning their data analysis programs for specific data
characteristics and a specific execution environment. We believe that the
research community needs to bring the powerful concepts of declarative
specification to current data analysis systems, in order to achieve the
broad big data technology adoption and effectively deliver the promise
that novel big data technologies offer. In addition, we will present the
vision of the Berlin Big Data Center (BBDC) with respect to combining
machine learning and data management.


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Biography:

Volker Markl is a Full Professor and Chair of the Database Systems and
Information Management (DIMA) group at the Technische Universität Berlin
(TU Berlin). Volker also holds a position as an adjunct full professor at
the University of Toronto and is director of the research group
"Intelligent Analysis of Mass Data" at DFKI, the German Research Center
for Artificial Intelligence. Volker is also director of the Berlin Big
Data Center, a collaborative research center bringing together research
groups in the areas of distributed systems, scalable data processing, text
mining, networking, machine learning and applications in several areas,
such as healthcare, logistics, Industrie 4.0, and information
marketplaces. His research interests include: new hardware architectures
for information management, scalable processing and optimization of
declarative data analysis programs, and scalable data science, including
graph and text mining, and scalable machine learning. Over the course of
his career, has published numerous scholarly papers, filed 18 patents, and
has been involved in several startups, as founder or advisor. Volker has
garnered many prestigious awards, including the European Information
Society and Technology Prize, an IBM Outstanding Technological Achievement
Award, an IBM Shared University Research Grant, an HP Open Innovation
Award, an IBM Faculty Award, a Trusted-Cloud Award for Information
Marketplaces by the German Ministry of Economics and Technology, the Pat
Goldberg Memorial Best Paper Award, and a VLDB Best Paper award. Dr. Markl
currently serves as the secretary of the VLDB Endowment was recently
elected as one of Germany's leading "digital minds" (Digitale Köpfe) by
the German Informatics Society (GI).