Tuesday, Sept 25th, 09.00 - 10.30, Auditorium Maximum
Abstract: The Amazon.com technology platform provides a set of highly advanced business and infrastructure services implemented using ultra-scalable distributed systems technologies. Within this environment we can identify a number of specific data access patterns, each with their own availability, consistency, performance and operational requirements in order to serve a collection of highly diverse business processes. In this presentation we will reviews these different patterns in detail and discuss which technologies are required to support them in an always-on environment.
Bio: Dr. Werner Vogels is Vice President & Chief Technology Officer at Amazon.com where he is responsible for driving the company's technology vision, which is to continuously enhance the innovation on behalf of Amazon's customers at a global scale.
Prior to joining Amazon, he worked as a researcher at Cornell University where he was a principal investigator in several research projects that target the scalability and robustness of mission-critical enterprise computing systems. He has held positions of VP of Technology and CTO in companies that handled the transition of academic technology into industry.
Vogels holds a Ph.D. from the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam and has authored many articles for journals and conferences, most of them on distributed systems technologies for enterprise computing.
Wednesday, Sept 26th, 09.00 - 10.30, Auditorium Maximum
Abstract: Moore's Law and the wave of technologies it enabled have led to tremendous improvements in productivity and the quality of life in industrialized nations. Yet, technology has had almost no effect on the other five billion people on our planet. In this talk I argue that decreasing costs of computing and wireless networking make this the right time to spread the benefits of technology, and that the biggest missing piece is a lack of focus on the problems that matter. After covering some example applications that have shown very high impact, I present some our own preliminary results, including the use of novel low-cost telemedicine to improve the vision of real people, with over 20,000 patients examined so far. I conclude with some discussion on the role of database researchers in this new area.
Bio: Dr. Brewer focuses on all aspects of Internet-based systems, including technology, strategy, and government. As a researcher, he has led projects on scalable servers, search engines, network infrastructure, sensor networks, and security. His current focus in (high) technology for developing regions, with projects in India, Ghana, Rwanda, Uganda among others, and including health care, education, and connectivity.
In 1996, he co-founded Inktomi Corporation with a Berkeley grad student based on their research prototype, and helped lead it onto the Nasdaq 100 before it was bought by Yahoo! in March 2003. In 2000, he founded the Federal Search Foundation, a 501-3(c) organization, which created the official US government portal with President Clinton, www.FirstGov.gov.
He was named a "Global Leader for Tomorrow" by the World Economic Forum, by the Industry Standard as the "most influential person on the architecture of the Internet", and by Forbes as one of their 12 "e-mavericks", for which he appeared on the cover.