June 25, 2013
Like all computer science and engineering departments, at Arizona State University (ASU), we regularly re-assess the impacts of our research and educational programs based on feedback from users of the technologies we develop and companies that hire our graduates. Last January, as part of the most recent of these efforts, we (in collaboration with IBM) […]
Read moreMay 14, 2013
Figure 1 shows a portion of a relational table contained in a real, large information system. The table concerns the customers of an organization, where each row stores data about a single customer. The first column contains her code (if the code is negative, then the record refers to a special customer, called “fictitious”), columns […]
Read moreMarch 22, 2013
Got your attention? Now that I have it, I would like to take a few minutes to discuss the role of limited attention and information overload in science. Attentive acts such as reading a scientific paper (or a tweet), answering an email, or watching a video require mental effort, and since the human brain’s capacity […]
Read moreMarch 6, 2013
Big Data should be Interesting Data! There are various definitions of Big Data; most center around a number of V’s like volume, velocity, variety, veracity – in short: interesting data (interesting in at least one aspect). However, when you look into research papers on Big Data, in SIGMOD, VLDB, or ICDE, the data that you […]
Read moreDecember 11, 2012
Fifty years ago a small team working to automate the business processes of the General Electric Low Voltage Switch Gear Department in Philadelphia built the first functioning prototype of a database management system. The Integrated Data Store was designed by Charles W. Bachman, who later won the ACM’s Turing Award for the accomplishment. He was […]
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