Yahoo! Research at SIGMOD/PODS 2008
The 28th ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of Data/Principles of Database Systems was held June 9 to 12 in beautiful Vancouver, British Columbia. The joint conference is universally regarded as the leading international forum for database researchers, practitioners, developers, and users. SIGMOD looks at more experimental research, while PODS covers the theory behind databases.
The attendees, including representatives from Yahoo! Research, IBM, Google, Microsoft, and major universities and research institutions, gathered together to explore cutting-edge ideas and exchange techniques, tools, and experiences. Many of the most influential papers in the field were presented at the conference, with a very selective 18% acceptance rate this year. 78 papers were accepted out of 435 submissions. Yahoo! Research was well represented, with 4 accepted SIGMOD papers and 1 accepted PODS paper.
Researcher Adam Siberstein presented a paper he co-authored entitled, “Efficient Bulk Insertion into a Distributed Ordered Table.” It was very well-received and generated many questions from the audience. Researcher Utkarsh Srivastava also presented a co-authored paper, “Pig Latin: A Not-so Foreign Language for Data Processing.” The talk was well-attended and resulted in a lot of buzz, including questions from the audience about its implementation and ability to be recompiled into Google’s MapReduce framework. Others were fascinated by the fact that Pig is based on an algebraic set of operators, rather than a calculus-based framework (SQL) so that the developer can specify the sequence of processing steps iteratively. Researcher Cong Yu and former intern Alban Galland demonstrated their co-authored work entitled, “From del.icio.us to x.qui.site: Recommendations in Social Tagging Sites.” The demo received a lot of attention from the attendees and people were intrigued by this new field of a potential connection between database and recommender systems.
Raghu Ramakrishnan’s panel “Between Industry and Academia: Challenges, Pros, and Cons” drew a large audience at the New Researcher Symposium. The goal of the symposium was to give graduate students and junior researchers advice on various challenges involved in changing careers.
Yahoo! Researchers Cong Yu and Nilesh Dalvi were recipients of the Dissertation Honorable Mention award for their outstanding work on theoretical foundations and development of algorithms with great impact on important practical problems.
The overall feeling was that representatives from both academia and industry were very interested in finding out what Yahoo! Research is up to. But perhaps the most unforgettable part of the week was the conference hotel’s picturesque location, at the mouth of Vancouver’s renowned Stanley Park – home to the popular 8 kilometer seawall that borders the Pacific Ocean, and more specifically Coal Harbor, Burrad Inlet, Georgia Strait, and English Bay.
Yahoo! Research SIGMOD Papers:
Efficient Bulk Insertion into a Distributed Ordered Table
Adam Silberstein, Brian Cooper, Utkarsh Srivastava, Erik Vee, Ramana Yerneni, Raghu Ramakrishnan
Pig Latin: A Not-So-Foreign Language for Data Processing
Christopher Olston, Benjamin Reed, Utkarsh Srivastava, Ravi Kumar, Andrew Tomkins
From del.icio.us to x.qui.site: Recommendations in Social Tagging Sites
Sihem Amer-Yahia, Alban Galland, Julia Stoyanovich, Cong Yu
Toward Best-effort Information Extraction
Warren Shen, Robert McCann, Pedro DeRose, Raghu Ramakrishnan, AnHai Doan
Yahoo! Research PODS Paper:
Approximation Algorithms for Co-Clustering Problems
Aris Anagnostopoulos, Anirban Dasgupta and Ravi Kumar
