I remember I said in the previous blog I was going to have a crazy summer, but I didn't expect it is this crazy..........

Just passed the SODA deadline a few minute ago.

I had two submissions: one is about a clustering problem with some new interesting constraints and the other is on an interesting generalization of the classic machine scheduling problem. Hopefully, I will get lucky results on a nonempty subset of them....

 

A few days ago, I was in Providence attending SIGMOD09. Something interesting to say about the conf.

First is the super surprising and exciting news that I got the VLDB09 best paper award.  I had never expected that before and was really surprised.

Honestly, it is a bit too much to a student like me who is sort of new in DB and I am not quite ready....Perhas it means to be an alert dictating me to learn more DB..:)

 

I really enjoyed the conference since I made a lot of friends and met quite a few famous researcher. A new discovery is there are so many prof/student graduated from Fudan are doing DB right now. It is not at all easy to find so many Fudaner outside Fudan and all are doing DB, ranging prof/ass prof/phd/lab researcher/industy ppl.....

 

It was also a good chance to meet those legendary big name in DB, e.g. micheal stonebreaker, ronald fagin..., they are true bigboss da学霸!

This is the story. When I was doing my PODS talk, fagin was sitting in the first row but I didn't know that was fagin at that time.

 I had prepared the talk a couple of times and the time should be just enough. During the talk, fagin kept interrupting and asking me questions. I was thinking "这老头谁啊。。。". Since fagin always asked question, there was an other lady, she thought maybe question was allowed during the talk and tried to ask one. Before she finished her first sentence, the session chair stopped her with "we are running out time, plz take the questions offline...". But fagin kept asking questions and the session chair responded with super smile in his face...Finally, I couldn't quite finish all the stuffs that I wished to cover and skipped a lot of details. Later on, my advisor told me that was ronald fagin.....

 

To me, this SIGMOD was not as exciting as the just-ended STOC09. A major reason is that I can only understand a limited number of talks. Hope next time things will get better.

 

A couple of technical remarks: one is column store seems becoming very hot now. Another is probabilistic database, many sigmod/pods sessions are devoted for it. See also the most recent issue of the Comm ACM, there is a long artical about it. I think it should be the way we manage uncertain data in real life applications, but just not sure how far it will go, will this theory result in an indispensible commercial system? Let's see. 

 

In Aug, I will go to UIUC for a wireless network summer school and then go to Germany to visit MPI and then to France for VLDB. Crazy summer goes on an on....