Panel: One Platform for Mining Structured and Unstructured Data: Dream or Reality?
Wednesday, September 13, 16:00-17:30  
Room 320

Moderator: Dina Bitton
Panelists: Franz Faerber (SAP AG, Germany), Laura Haas (IBM Almaden Research Center, USA), Jayavel Shanmugasundaram (Yahoo! Research, USA)

Although enterprises commonly utilize sophisticated data integration technology and business intelligence tools for analysis of structured data, analysis of unstructured data is a separate process and is often limited to capabilities supported by a search engine. Users have separate and vastly different interfaces for structured and unstructured data: Business Intelligence for structured data and Search for unstructured. This panel will discuss these fundamental and controversial issues: 1. Information Integration: how do we ˇ°integrateˇ± structured and unstructured data? Data warehousing versus federation; relational, multi-dimensional or other views? 2. Content mining: can we source, transform and analyze unstructured data alongside with structured data? 3. Can we retain the simplicity of the Search interface and yet provide some of the sophistication of structured data analysis tools?

 

Industrial Track Panel: Globalization: Challenges to Database Community
Thursday, September 14, 16:00-17:30  
Room 311

Moderator: Sang Cha
Panelists:
P. Ananda(Microsoft Research India Lab, India), Meichun Hsu (HP Labs China, China), C. Mohan (IBM India, India), Rajeev Rastogi (Bell Labs Research India, India), Vishal Sikka (SAP AG, Germany), Honesty Young (IBM China Research Lab, China)

Globalization is flattening the world. As database researcher, we are proud that information technology is a critical enabler of globalization. At the same time, we are seeing that research and development of information technology is also being globalized. In recent years, many R&D labs were established in Asia, especially, in India and China, by global IT companies. Some of our colleagues have moved with globalization to establish new labs or to lead R&D in newly established labs. For those who have not moved physically, it is common to work with colleagues at remote labs with time difference. The objective of this panel is to invite pioneers leading R&D globalization and to share their vision and challenges, and to discuss how globalization impacts the future of database and information management research, education, and industry. P. Anandan is the director of Microsoft Research India Lab. Meichun Hsu manages a newly created lab for HP in Beijing, China. C. Mohan, an IBM Fellow, has a new role of Chief Scientist of IBM India. Rajeev Rastogi, a Bell Labs Fellow, is the executive director of Bell Labs Research Center in Bangalore, India. Vishal Sikka, as Senior VP and GM of SAP's Architecture Group, oversees SAP's global R&D activities. Honesty Young is the deputy director of IBM China Research Lab.