Yahoo! Researcher Stands the "Test-of-Time" at ACM SIGMOD/PODS 2006

The windy city of Chicago served as the backdrop for ACM SIGMOD/PODS 2006, one of the largest database conferences of the year held from June 26th to 30th. Yahoo! Research had a substantial presence, with Yahoo! researchers making several presentations. One of our most recent additions, Raghu Ramakrishnan, shared victory of the Test-of-Time award -- a significant recognition that is given to a paper submitted to the conference ten years ago, deemed to have the most impact today.

Other highlights included accepted papers by Yahoo! researchers Chris Olston, Sihem Amer Yahia and Ravi Kumar (at PODS). All papers were co-authored. Ramakrishnan had two accepted research papers at SIGMOD and co-authored a tutorial on managing information extraction. As Chair of ACM SIGMOD, he was also very involved in organizing the conference.

This year’s event saw a strong focus on the Web. Sessions featured Web services, RSS, and ranking results. Tutorials were held on data integration over the Web and the semantic Web. Papers dealt with securely scaling Web applications, querying data sources via Web services, "query optimization" for searching vs. crawling, optimizing geographic Web search, verifying web services, and the evolution of page popularity.

Tutorials, workshops and papers weren’t the only items on the agenda at the conference. Yahoo! Research hosted an evening reception which drew more people than the original invite list. Clad in purple t-shirts, Yahoo researchers mingled with their colleagues while testing the minds of those who dared to take on the Yahoodoku challenge.