September 29, 2010:

Keynote Panel: "New and old Data stores"

Panelists:

Ulf Michael (Monty) Widenius:

Main author of the original version of the open-source MySQL database and a founding member of the MySQL AB company.

Michael Keith:

Mike Keith is an architect at Oracle and has close to 20 years of experience as a practitioner and mentor of distributed systems and persistence. He co-lead JSR-220, the JCP expert group that created EJB 3.0 and JPA 1.0 and co-authored the first book devoted to JPA called "Pro EJB 3: Java Persistence API". He sits on a number of technology expert groups and committees, including JSR-317 working on JPA 2.0, and the OSGi Enterprise Expert Group that is developing OSGi specifications for enterprise applications.

Patrick Linskey:

Patrick Linskey has been involved in object/relational mapping and databases for the last decade. As the founder and CTO of SolarMetric, Patrick drove the technical direction of the company and oversaw the development of Kodo, through its acquisition by BEA. At BEA, Patrick led the EJB team in designing and implementing the WebLogic Server EJB 3.0 solution, and represented BEA on the JDO and EJB3 expert groups. He is a contributor to the Apache OpenJPA project. Since leaving Oracle, Patrick has worked on a number of projects, ranging from traditional three-tier web and mobile applications to C# peer - to - peer client applications with custom-designed distributed storage solutions.

Robert Greene:

Robert Greene is responsible for defining Versant's overall object database strategy and direction with over 15 years experience delivering OO solutions. Robert provides guidance and technical expertise to key customers regarding Versant's product lines including product architecture, implementation, features, and future capabilities. Through his work at Versant, Robert has helped many large companies implement complex distributed systems in the bio-informatics, telecommunications, defense, finance, and transportation industries. Robert is an industry thought leader with extensive experience in object-oriented systems design writing and presenting regularly at Java conferences and seminars on the topic of object persistence and J2EE application architectures. Robert is an author on the topic of object relational mapping and is the project lead for the Eclipse EJB tooling initiative known as JSR220 ORM.

Leon Guzenda:

Leon Guzenda is Chief Technology Officer of Objectivity, Inc. Leon Guzenda was one of the founding members of Objectivity, Inc. in 1988 and one of the original architects of Objectivity/DB. He has had a strong interest in objects since using Simula in the mid-1960s to model automation systems during a pre-University year in industry. His B.Sc was in Electronic Engineering at the University of Wales. It was one of the few courses in the United Kingdom at that time that offered undergraduates substantial access to both analog and digital computers. After graduating he worked for Time Sharing Limited, the first company to deliver a fault tolerant dial-up and dedicated line time sharing system. He built the DBMSs and applications for several early database projects, including the original Thames Flood Barrier Project and the New Scotland Yard Criminal Vehicle Index. He became involved with the CODASYL DBTG specifications for network databases in 1971. He moved to International Computers Ltd. In 1972 to join the team working on the ICL 2900 range of computers. He worked on operating systems for the first two years, and then he was appointed design and development manager for ICL's 2900 IDMS product. He moved to ICL Dataskil in 1976 and as Principal Project Director he delivered major database projects for the MoD, NATO and leading multinationals. He moved from England to California in 1983 to work with former colleagues at Automation Technology Products. He managed the development of the ODBMS for the Cimplex solid modeling and numerical control system and the Factory Automation Information Management product. He met the other founders of Objectivity, Inc. in 1988 and they decided to build a robust, scalable, high performance ODBMS for the engineering, scientific and real-time markets. Always a strong believer in standards, he was one of the proposers of the comp.database.object forum on Usenet and was a strong proponent of object-oriented standards at the Object Management Group, Object Database Management Group and many industry-specific standards groups. His current responsibilities include working with Objectivity's customers and partners to deploy Objectivity/DB in leading edge applications, primarily in government, defense and industrial systems. He has published papers for, or spoken at, a wide range of venues, including ACM/IEEE, Autofact, CERN Summer School, CITO, HIPOD, IFIP, Management Roundtable, PADDA, the Royal United Services Institute, Supercomputing, Telemanagement Forum, the Very Large Database series and WorldView.

Peter Neubauer, COO NeoTechnology:

Peter has been deeply involved in programming for 10 years and is co-founder of a number of Open Source projects like Neo4j, Tinkerpop, OPS4J and Qi4j. Peter loves connecting things, writing crappy prototypes and throwing together new ideas and projects around graphs and society-scale innovation. If you want brainstorming-feed him a Latte and you are in business.

September 29, 2010:

Keynote: "Search Computing Challenges and Directions"

Stefano Ceri, Professor of Database Systems at the Politenico di Milano:

Search Computing (SeCo, www.search-computing.it) is a project funded by the European Research Council (ERC). It focuses on building the answers to complex search queries like "Where can I attend an interesting conference in my field close to a sunny beach?" by interacting with a constellation of cooperating search services, using ranking and joining of results as the dominant factors for service composition. SeCo started on November 2008 and will last 5 years. The seminar will give a general introduction to the Search Computing approach and then focus on its query optimization and execution engine, the aspect of the project which is most tightly related to "objects and databases" technologies. Bio: Stefano Ceri (http://home.dei.polimi.it/ceri/) is Professor of "Database Systems" at DEI, Politecnico di Milano; his research interests are focused on extending database technology to incorporate data distribution, deductive and active rules, object orientation, XML query languages; recent work is focused on design methods for data-intensive WEB sites, stream reasoning, and search computing. He is vice-chairman (representing Politecnico di Milano) of the Executive board of Alta Scuola Politecnica, a school of excellence for master-level students which is jointly organized by Politecnico di Milano and Politecnico di Torino (2007-2010). He is author of about 250 articles on International Journals and Conference Proceedings, and is co-author of 9 international books; he is co-editor in chief of the book series "Data Centric Systems and Applications" (Springer-Verlag). He is responsible of several EU Projects projects at Politecnico di Milano, including LarKC "Large Knowledge Collider" (2008-2011). In July 2008 he has been awarded an IDEAS Advanced Grant, funded by the European Research Council (ERC), on "Search Computing" (2008-2013). He is co-inventor of WebML a model for the conceptual design of Web applications (US Patent 6,591,271, July 2003) and co-founder of Web Models, a startup of Politecnico di Milano focused on WebML commercialization by means of the product WebRatio (www.webratio.com).

September 30, 2010:

Keynote: "Searching the Web of Objects"

Ricardo Baeza-Yates, VP, Yahoo! Research, Europe and Latin America:

We present a pragmatic approach to search the Web of Objects, that is, a Web where entities such as people or places are recognized and exploited. We outline a search architecture where information extraction and semantic technologies play key roles. This architecture has to cope with incompleteness as well as noise to expand the capabilities of current search engines. The main open problems for research are related with recognizing the entities in the query and ranking objects. We show some of these ideas through features or demos already available. Ricardo Baeza-Yates is VP of Yahoo! Research for Europe and Latin America, leading the labs at Barcelona, Spain and Santiago, Chile, as well as supervising the newer lab in Haifa, Israel. Until 2005 he was the director of the Center for Web Research at the Department of Computer Science of the Engineering School of the University of Chile; and ICREA Professor at the Dept. of Technology of Univ. Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona, Spain. He is co-author of the best-seller book Modern Information Retrieval, published in 1999 by Addison-Wesley with a second edition coming in 2010, as well as co-author of the 2nd edition of the Handbook of Algorithms and Data Structures, Addison-Wesley, 1991; and co-editor of Information Retrieval: Algorithms and Data Structures, Prentice-Hall, 1992, among more than 150 other publications. He has received the Organization of American States award for young researchers in exact sciences (1993) and with two Brazilian colleagues obtained the COMPAQ prize for the best CS Brazilian research article (1997). In 2003 he was the first computer scientist to be elected to the Chilean Academy of Sciences. During 2007 he was awarded the Graham Medalfor innovation in computing, given by the University of Waterloo to distinguished ex-alumni. In 2009 he was awarded the Latin American distinction for contributions to CS in the region and became an ACM Fellow.

Keynote: "Unifying Remote Data, Remote Procedures, and Web Services"

William Cook, Assistant Professor, Department of Computer Sciences, University of Texas at Austin.

Most large-scale applications integrate remote services and/or transactional databases. Yet building software that efficiently invokes distributed service or accesses relational databases is still quite difficult. Existing approaches to these problems are based on the Remote Procedure Call (RPC), Object-Relational Mapping (ORM), or Web Services (WS). RPCs have been generalized to support distributed object systems. ORM tools generally support a form of query sublanguage for efficient object selection, but it is not well-integrated with the host language. Web Services may seems to be a step backwards, yet document-oriented services and REST are gaining popularity. The last 20 years have produced a long litany of technologies based on these concepts, including ODBC, CORBA, DCE, DCOM, RMI, DAO, OLEDB, SQLJ, JDBC, EJB, JDO, Hibernate, XML-RPC, WSDL, Axis and LINQ. Even with these technologies, complex design patterns for service facades and/or bulk data transfers must be followed to optimize communication between client and server or client and database, leading to programs that are difficult to modify and maintain. While significant progress has been made, there is no widely accepted solution or even agreement about what the solution should look like. In this talk I present a new unified approach to invocation of distributed services and data access. The solution involves a novel control flow construct that partitions a program block into remote and local computations, while efficiently managing the communication between them. The solution does not require proxies, an embedded query language, or constructions/decoding of service requests. The end result is a natural unified interface to distributed services and data, which can be added to any programming language. Bio: William Cook is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Sciences at the University of Texas at Austin. His research is focused on object-oriented programming, programming languages, modeling languages, and the interface between programming languages and databases. Prior to joining UT in 2003, Dr. Cook was Chief Technology Officer and co-founder of Allegis Corporation. He was chief architect for several award-winning products, including the eBusiness Suite at Allegis, the Writer's Solution for Prentice Hall, and the AppleScript language at Apple Computer. At HP Labs his research focused on the foundations of object-oriented languages, including formal models of mixins, inheritance, and typed models of object-oriented languages. He completed his Ph.D. in Computer Science at Brown University in 1989.