We decided not to submit our research paper again (the deadline is Friday). We’ve got a few useful results, but they don’t cohere well, and none of us think that they would make a good conference paper. I think we’re all getting kind of sick of this particular topic, and the best thing may just be to move on. It’s too bad, but I guess that’s how research goes. We are planning on submitting a few of the results to a games oriented conference – it won’t carry as much weight research wise, but at least we will have something to show for ourselves.
Category Archives: CS
Good News
Our demo paper got accepted to SIGMOD, the largest database conference. A demonstration paper is a three page description of a system that you then demonstrate at the conference. It’s not as big a deal as a research paper, which is longer and contains more original (and generally theoretical) work, but it’s still great that we got in.
Google Ads
Talk about targeted advertising… Google must have let their engineers design an ad or two. They could certainly get me to buy whatever they want (via Ars Technica).
Heartwarming
The colloquium speaker this week was Tom Leighton, an applied math professor from MIT who founded Akamai in the late 90s. Akamai now serves something like 20% of the web’s traffic and is worth on the order of $5 billion. The neat thing was that Leighton works in the Theory group at MIT. People often say that theoretical computer science is of no use in the real world, but Akamai’s techniques (based on consistent hashing, among other things) have certainly made a difference!
Stonebraker
The latest ACM Queue has an interesting interview with Michael Stonebraker about the future of databases. Stonebraker was an important figure in the early development of relational database systems, and now he’s agitating for a move away from the relational model. Coincidentally, I’m giving a presentation on Stonebraker’s latest paper (pdf) in the DB seminar this semester.
Update: Stonebraker’s certainly been getting a lot of press. See his post in The Database Column and an blurb on Slashdot. I found myself agreeing with some of the comments on Slashdot suggesting that while Stonebraker may provide ample evidence for changing database system architecture, that’s not necessarily the same as abandoning the relational model. I’ll continue to follow his work, but I’m also going to order the definitive guide to relational database theory, just in case.