Justin Levandoski + Dharma Shukla (Microsoft)

Speakers:

Justin Levandoski, Dharma Shukla

Azure DocumentDB is Microsoft's multi-tenant distributed database service for managing JSON documents at Internet scale. DocumentDB is now generally available to Azure developers. Built from the ground up as a multi-tenant service, DocumentDB is designed to operate within extremely frugal resource budgets while providing predictable performance and robust resource isolation to its tenants. DocumentDB indexing enables automatic indexing of documents... Read More

DB Seminar [Spring 2015]: Round Table Discussion

This Monday we will have a round table discussion Read More

DB Seminar [Spring 2015]: Bruno Ribeiro

Speaker:

Bruno Ribeiro

Abstract Complex network phenomena – such as information cascades in online social networks – are hard to fully observe, model, and forecast. In forecasting, a recent trend has been to forgo the use of parsimonious models in favor of models with increasingly large degrees of freedom that are trained to learn the behavior of a process from historical data. Extrapolating... Read More

DB Seminar [Spring 2015]: Miguel Araujo

Speaker:

Miguel Araujo

Abstract: What do real communities in social networks look like? How can we find them efficiently? Community detection plays a key role in understanding the structure of real-life graphs with impact on recommendation systems, load balancing and routing. Previous community detection methods look for uniform blocks in adjacency matrices, but after studying four real networks with ground-truth communities, we provide... Read More

Peter Bailis (University of California, Berkeley)

Speaker:

Peter Bailis

The rise of Internet-scale geo-replicated services has led to considerable upheaval in the design of modern data management systems. Namely, given the availability, latency, and throughput penalties associated with classic mechanisms such as serializable transactions, a broad class of systems (e.g., "NoSQL") has sought weaker alternatives that reduce the use of expensive coordination during system operation, often at the cost... Read More

DB Seminar [Spring 2015]: Pengtao Xie

Speaker:

Pengtao Xie

Abstract: Personal photos are enjoying explosive growth with the popularity of photo-taking devices and social media. The vast amount of online photos largely exhibit users’ interests, emotion and opinions. Mining user interests from personal photos can boost a number of utilities, such as advertising, interest based community detection and photo recommendation. In this talk, I will introduce our work on mining user interests from personal photos.... Read More

DB Seminar [Spring 2015]: Gisele Pappa

Speaker:

Gisele Pappa

Abstract: In this seminar I will present three of my ongoing projects. I will start talking about dengue fever modeling, its challenges and opportunities. Dengue fever is a tropical, mosquito transmitted disease that has been growing significantly in the past decade. The main goal of this project is to exploit real cases data and Twitter data to generate a predictive system that allows government policies... Read More

DB Seminar [Spring 2015]: Konstantinos Pelechrinis (UPitt)

Speaker:

Konstantinos Pelechrinis

Abstract: The proliferation of mobile handheld devices in combination with the technological advancements in mobile computing has led to a number of innovative services that make use of the location information available on such devices. Traditional yellow pages websites have now moved to mobile platforms, giving the opportunity to local businesses and potential, near-by, customers to connect. These platforms can offer an... Read More

DB Seminar [Spring 2015]: Danai Koutra (Job talk dry run v2.0)

Speaker:

Danai Koutra

Job talk dry run - round 2 Abstract: Networks naturally capture a host of real-world interactions, spanning from friendships to brain activity. But, given a massive graph, such as the Facebook social network, what can be learned about its structure? Are there any changes over time? Where should people's attention be directed? In this talk I will present my work on scalable algorithms that... Read More

DB Seminar [Spring 2015]: Vagelis Papalexakis (Thesis Proposal dry run)

Speaker:

Vagelis Papalexakis

Abstract: Given a Knowledge Base that records millions of relations of the form “Barack Obama is the president of USA”, how can we automatically learn new synonyms and enhance the Knowledge Base? Imagine now measuring the brain activity of a person while reading words that appear in this Knowledge Base; how can we relate information processing in the brain, and... Read More