VLDB 2022: Panels

Panel Title: Startups Founded by Database Researchers

Date and Time: 6th September 2022 (Tuesday) - 13:30 - 15:00 (Sydney Time)

Moderator:

1. Anand Deshpande, Persistent Systems, India

   Bio: Dr. Anand Deshpande is the Founder, Chairman, and Managing Director of Persistent Systems since inception and is responsible for the overall leadership of the Company. Anand holds a Bachelor of Technology (B. Tech.) with Honours (Hons.) in Computer Science and Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Kharagpur, and an M.S. and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana, USA. He has been recognized by both his alma maters — as a Distinguished Alumnus in 2012 by IIT Kharagpur and by the School of Informatics of Indiana University with the Career Achievement Award in 2007. Anand is a true technology visionary and has been the driving force in growing Persistent Systems from its inception in 1990 to the publicly traded global Company of today. Prior to founding Persistent Systems, Anand began his professional career at Hewlett-Packard Laboratories in Palo Alto, California, where he worked as a Member of Technical Staff from May 1989 to October 1990. He is a founding trustee of Persistent Foundation and has served numerous positions at various professional and non-profit organizations — NASSCOM’s Executive Council, founding President of Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) India, Software Exporters’ Association of Pune (SEAP), Pune Chapter of Computer Society of India (CSI), CII’s Pune Zonal Council, Trustee in the Computer History Museum, founding member of Indian Software Products Industry Round Table (iSPIRT), founding member of I4C, a member of the Dean’s Advisory Council in the School of Informatics, Computing and Engineering of Indiana University. After transitioning from the role of CEO at Persistent, Anand is committed to making a broader impact and is focused on data, higher education, and entrepreneurship. He is a part-time member of the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI), trustee of the VLDB Foundation, and is actively working on projects to create a data platform for Indian patients suffering from cancer and diabetes. He is an honorary Adjunct Professor of Practice at the Desai Sethi School of Entrepreneurship at IIT Bombay, Chairman of the Board of Governors of IIT Patna and the interim Chairman of the Board of Governors at IIIT Allahabad. In addition, he is on the governing board of the College of Engineering, Pune and on the board of Gokhale Institute of Politics and Economics, Pune. With his family members, Anand has established DeAsra Foundation. This non-profit entity focuses on creating self-employment at scale and through the Second Orbit program, in collaboration with Dr. Ashok Korwar, he has helped hundreds of entrepreneurs scale their businesses. Anand is married to Sonali and they have a daughter and a son.

2. Vincent Gramoli, University of Sydney and Redbelly Network, Australia

   Bio: Vincent Gramoli (https://bit.ly/3boPyAM) is the founder and CTO of Redbelly Network (https://bit.ly/3Jp7yI7). He received a Future Fellowship from the Australian Research Council and leads the Concurrent Systems Research Group at the University of Sydney. His expertise is in distributed computing and security. In the past, Gramoli has been affiliated with INRIA, Cornell, CSIRO and EPFL. He received his PhD from Université de Rennes and his Habilitation from UPMC Sorbonne University. He served as Program Committee Chair of international scientific conferences (NETYS’13, FAB’21, Tokenomics’21, OPODIS’21) and co-wrote a book on Consistent Distributed Storage published by Morgan & Claypool. He received the best paper awards of ICDCS 2021, IPDPS 2022 and ICDCS 2022. With his lab, he found vulnerabilities in the major Ethereum code bases called geth and OpenEthereum and proposed the Redbelly Blockchain, a secure blockchain whose performance scales to world-wide deployments. His Blockchain Scalability MOOC (https://bit.ly/3vy1BTv) on Coursera is taken by thousands of students.

3. Chen Li, University of California at Irvine, USA

   Bio: Chen Li is a professor in the Department of Computer Science at UC Irvine. He received his Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from Stanford University, and his M.S. and B.S. in Computer Science from Tsinghua University, China, respectively. He was a recipient of an NSF CAREER award and several test-of-time publication awards, a part-time visiting research scientist at Google, PC co-chair of VLDB 2015, and an ACM distinguished member. Since January 2020, he’s the treasurer and a board member of the VLDB Endowment. Since July 2020, he is the Faculty Director of the ICS Master of Computer Science Program. He was a co-founder and CTO of a startup to commercialize his research results

4. Srini V. Srinivasan, Aerospike

   Bio: Srini V. Srinivasan is Founder and Chief Technology Officer at Aerospike. When it comes to databases, Srini Srinivasan is one of the recognized pioneers of Silicon Valley. He has over two decades of experience designing, developing and operating high scale real-time infrastructures. Srini co-founded Aerospike in 2009 to solve the scaling problems he experienced with other databases while he was Senior Director of Engineering at Yahoo. He is an inventor of over 35 patents in database, web, mobile and distributed systems technologies. Srini has a B.Tech, Computer Science from Indian Institute of Technology, Madras and both an M.S. and Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

5. Mark Raasveldt, DuckDB Labs and Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica, The Netherlands

   Bio: Mark Raasveldt is the co-founder of DuckDB Labs, where he currently works as CTO and lead developer on the DuckDB database system. He is also working as a postdoc in the Database Architectures group at the Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI). Mark did his PhD at the CWI, working on efficient integration of machine learning and analytics programs with relational database management systems.

6. Cyrus Shahabi, University of Southern California, USA

   Bio: Cyrus Shahabi is a Professor of Computer Science, Electrical & Computer Engineering and Spatial Sciences; Helen N. and Emmett H. Jones Professor of Engineering; and the director of the Integrated Media Systems Center (IMSC) at USC’s Viterbi School of Engineering. He was also the chair of the Computer Science Department at USC from 2017 to 2022. He was co-founder of two USC spin-offs, Geosemble Technologies and Tallygo, which both were acquired, in July 2012 and March 2019, respectively. He received his B.S. in Computer Engineering from Sharif University of Technology and his M.S. and Ph.D. Degrees in Computer Science from the University of Southern California. He authored two books and more than three hundred research papers in databases, GIS and multimedia with 14 US Patents. He was an Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems, IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering and VLDB Journal. He is currently on the editorial board of the ACM Transactions on Spatial Algorithms and Systems and ACM Computers in Entertainment. Dr. Shahabi is a recipient of the ACM Distinguished Scientist award, U.S. Presidential Early Career Awards for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), and the NSF CAREER award. He is a fellow of National Academy of Inventors (NAI) and IEEE.

Panel Title: Cloud Data Systems: What are the Opportunities for the Database Research Community?

Panel Overview: Public Infrastructure Clouds have transformed our approach to computing. They have led to emergence of several “Cloud Native” data services that leverage the unique functionality of infrastructure clouds, especially their ability to provision, scale up, and scale down resources elastically. This panel will take an in-depth look at the cloud native data services, their key differences with traditional database software, and the unique technical challenges these systems must address. Specifically, we will consider these aspects in the context of OLTP/HTAP, Data Analytics, Data Integration, and Data Governance. Infrastructure Clouds continue to evolve. We have seen a transition from provisioned to serverless resource allocation. The disaggregation of storage and compute is common in infrastructure cloud offerings. Currently, disaggregation of memory is being actively explored. With the end of Dennard scaling, there is increasing interest in leveraging accelerators, leading to increasingly heterogeneous compute platforms. Edge IoT devices as endpoints of the infrastructure cloud introduce new opportunities and challenges. Data governance has emerged as a critical need. The industry has proposed data clouds as a value-add abstraction layer on top of multiple infrastructure clouds. The panel will reflect on these developments and discuss what innovations will be needed for the next generation cloud native data services. The panel will also take stock of the contributions the research community has made in the evolution of cloud native data services. While hindsight is always 20:20, the panel will reflect on what opportunities the research community may have missed, if any, for even greater impact. As part of that discussion, the panelists will discuss if there are any structural impediments that need to be removed to ensure greater impact of the community in the future. We will then look forward and ask ourselves what challenges the research community can address to influence the future of cloud native data services. We will end with an interactive Q&A session with the audience.

Date and Time: 7 September 2022 (Wednesday) - 8:00am - 9:30am (Sydney Time)

Moderator: Surajit Chaudhuri, Microsoft

Panelists:

1. Magdalena Balazinska, University of Washington, USA

   Bio: Magdalena Balazinska https://www.cs.washington.edu/people/faculty/magda is a Professor and the Director of the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington. Her current research focuses on data management for data science, big data systems, cloud computing, and image and video analytics. She served as a PC co-chair for the VLDB'20 conference. Magdalena is an ACM Fellow. She holds a Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (2006). She was named a Microsoft Research New Faculty Fellow (2007). Magdalena received the inaugural VLDB Women in Database Research Award (2016) for her work on scalable distributed data systems. She also received an ACM SIGMOD Test-of-Time Award (2017) for her work on fault-tolerant distributed stream processing and a 10- year most influential paper award (2010) from her earlier work on reengineering software clones.

2. AnHai Doan, University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA

   Bio: AnHai Doan https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~anhai/ is Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor and Gurindar S. Sohi Professor of Computer Science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His interests cover data integration, data science, and machine learning. AnHai received the ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award in 2003, a CAREER Award in 2004, and a Sloan Fellowship in 2007. He co-authored Principles of Data Integration, a Morgan-Kaufmann textbook in 2012. Data integration technologies from his group have been productionized at several companies, including Google, Walmart, and Informatica. Currently, AnHai also works as Vice President of Technology at Informatica, helping to build a broad range of data integration platforms on the cloud, using databases, machine learning, and big data technologies.

3. Joseph M. Hellerstein, University of California, USA

   Bio: Joseph M. Hellerstein https://dsf.berkeley.edu/jmh/index.html is the Jim Gray Professor of Computer Science at the University of California, Berkeley, whose work focuses on data-centric systems and the way they drive computing. He is an ACM Fellow, an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow and the recipient of three ACM-SIGMOD "Test of Time" awards for his research. Hellerstein is a co-founder of Aqueduct, which is bringing new open source technology for Prediction Infrastructure and cloud services to market. Previously he co-founded Trifacta, the pioneering company in Data Preparation based on the Wrangler research project. Hellerstein has served on the technical advisory boards of a number of computing and Internet companies including DellEMC, Greenplum, SurveyMonkey, Acryl Data, Brim Data, and Datometry.

4. Hanuma Kodavalla, Microsoft, USA

   Bio: Hanuma Kodavalla https://www.linkedin.com/in/hanuma-kodavalla-2439573/ is a Technical Fellow in the Azure Databases group at Microsoft where he has been for twenty years. He previously worked at Data General, Digital Equipment Corporation, Oracle, Sybase and Asera. For more than three decades, Hanuma worked on many aspects of Relational Database Systems and has been instrumental in architecting multiple commercial database systems for high performance and high availability. Hanuma received BTech in Electronics and Communications in 1981 from National Institute of Technology, Warangal, India, MTech in Computer Science in 1983 from Indian Institute of Technology, Chennai, India, and MS in Computer Science in 1988 from University of Massachusetts, Amherst, USA. He has many patents related to novel implementation techniques for online transaction processing and data warehousing in the areas of concurrency control, recovery, high-availability, query processing and security.

5. Ippokratis Pandis, Amazon , USA

   Bio: Ippokratis Pandis is a VP/Distinguished Engineer at Amazon Web Services. He spends most of his time on AWS's Analytics services, especially Amazon Redshift. Redshift is Amazon's fully managed, petabyte-scale data warehouse service. Previously, Ippokratis has held positions as software engineer at Cloudera where he worked on the Impala SQL-on-Hadoop query engine, and as member of the research staff at the IBM Almaden Research Center, where he worked on IBM DB2 BLU. Ippokratis received his PhD from the ECE department at Carnegie Mellon University. He is the recipient of a Test-of-Time award at EDBT 2019. He is the General Chair of SIGMOD 2023 and the president of HPTS.

6. Matei Zaharia, Stanford University, USA

   Bio: Matei Zaharia https://cs.stanford.edu/people/matei/ is a Coufounder and Chief Technologist at Databricks as well as an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Stanford. He started the Apache Spark project during his PhD at UC Berkeley in 2009, and has worked broadly on other widely used data and machine learning software, including MLflow, Delta Lake and Apache Mesos. He works on a wide variety of projects in data management and machine learning at Databricks and Stanford. Matei’s research was recognized through the 2014 ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award, an NSF CAREER Award, and the US Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE).