SACMAT Keynote

20 June 2007 - Sophia Country Club, Sophia Antipolis, France

Keynote: Jorge Cuellar - Siemens Corporate Technology, Munich, Germany
Thoughts on Application Layer Access Control

In this keynote, Jorge presented some formal methods representation for the application layer of access control. He motivated the need for formal representation through various research initiatives currently in progress at Siemens, Germany:

• eHealth Care - ensure confidentiality of patient records
  
• Planes - distrusted software
  
• Citizen's portal - card to authenticate, management of access to different software.
  

He also discussed the rational for the need for security using UML system diagrams.

eTransactions were also discussed. Current security for e-Transactions are not enough for eCommerce needs. SSL are currently not made for eTransactions. What kind of access control do we need? What ever is chosen, ease of implementation is an important consideration. The hidden logic needs to consider confidentiality, integrity and atomicity.

ICDE 2007 Keynotes

IEEE 23rd International Conference on Data Engineering
17-19 April 2007 - The Marmara Hotel, Istanbul, Turkey

Keynote: Yannis Ioannidis

On the first day, Yannis Ioannidis gave a presentation on Emerging Open Agoras of Data and Information. He spoke about competitive markets, sharing of information and the motivation behind allowing the dissemination of information between parties through bargaining or other types of negotiation. I think the use of the term "Agora" was particularly appropriate based on our location (Istanbul). At the end of this presentation, he was asked to compare an Angora model with that of a Mall (US shopping center). Fun times.

Keynote: Ricardo Baeza-Yates

On the second day, Ricardo Baeza-Yates presented Challenges in Distributed Web Retrieval and discussed the issues of increasing Web data and using distributed machines to cope with scalability.

Keynote: Laura M. Haas

On the final day, Laura M. Haas spoke about Information for People, a presentation targeted at ICDE researchers to consider the HCI component of research development. I think this was the presentation I remember most vividly. She gave visual presentations and examples of some algorithm researchers who used GUI components to their research for representation of results. This visually helped anyone who was unfamiliar with the data to make clearer judgements. For example, instead of just looking at the numbers, std, and means, plot them and allow for dynamic modification of graph to anaylse trends in numerical data better. This of course was done in colour. Pretty. And she was right, it did help the comprehension of what was going on a lot.

However, I'm not sure how well it was received on my side of the room. There was some general consensus that while it's a nice idea to make our algorithms "pretty", the reason why HCI and Data Management were two distinctive areas was because the are completely two distinctive areas. I don't think there's another way to put it. So I think the best example I have is the OSI model. You're trying to merge the physical layer with the application layer. It's not quite that extreme but it's close. At ICDE, there were sessions and industry reports on more efficient caching techniques. How do we make that more GUI/user friendly? I think at this point in time in research, there is still a strong distinction between these things and there needs to be, otherwise the scope you start dealing with is just enormous. The point is abstraction and to work with manageable portions. It's a nice idea, but I'm not sure how practical it would be.

DMBI 2007 Keynote

Workshop on Data Mining and Business Intelligence
15 April 2007 - The Marmara Hotel, Istanbul, Turkey

Keynote: Jiawei Han - University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Research Frontiers in Advanced Data Mining and Business Intelligence


The purpose of this key note address was to give an general overview of current research areas in Data Mining. Technical detail was not covered. Instead, a highlight of the challenges and direction of existing data mining related topics that Jiawei had personal exeriences with was discussed.

Pattern mining was the first topic discussed. Frequent pattern mining was the first approach with apriori, then FPGROWTH, Eclat and so on. Closed mining developed from this due to the large number of patterns that can be generated by frequent pattern approaches. FPClose, Charm and max pattern mining were mentioned. Also mentioned is correlation mining (PageRank from Google) and compression of patterns and more compact representation of large result sets.

Information network analysis was also discussed. Graph mining and mining data with links or cross-relational mining falls into this category. One recent approach that was developed by one of Jiawei students was based on the disabmiguation of different people with the same name. In DBLP, there are 14 distinct people all with the name Wei Wang. All of them are in computer science and a large propotion is in data mining. It is difficult to determing which Wei Wang is being referred to, just by looking at publication type. The solution proposed is to analyse co-author data. Based on this, fairly successeful classifications were made. 13 distinct users were identified (one was misclassified as someone else) and there were 2-3 paper misclassifications for the other 13 people.

Another area of data mining is stream data mining such as internet network traffic. The aim of stream data mining is prompt classification such as in network intrusion detection systems. One recent work is the prompt update of stream data cubes based on statistical analysis.

Mining moving object data is also interesting. While the focus is not yet on prompt classification, moving ships, cars and different objects can identify anomalies or predict future direction. For example, analysis of ship movements can potentially identify anomalies that could be terrorist vehicles or illegal shipping operations. Analysis of trajectory of hurricanes can predict movement and study of seasonal animal movement can be done before construction of major highways for the least amount of disturbance to wildlife.

Spatial, temporal and multimedia data mining need to consider obstacles before correct classification can be performed.

Text and Web mining considers links between pages and key words. It is important to extract the correct information. There is lots of information available. One way to extract important information is to identify key structure components. Graphics algorithms can be used to identify sections of useful information as indicators for the actual information.

Data mining system and software engineering deals with the clustering and classification of software bugs, where they are detected and where the location of the bug actually resides.

Finally, data cube oriented and multi dimensional online analytic process was discussed and separated into four areas: regression cubes, prediction cubes, integration cube and ranking query processing and high dimensional OLAP.

2006 Grace Hopper Celebration of Women and Computing Keynote Speakers

It is no great feat to place 1000 women in a room. It is however, somewhat of an accomplishment to place 1000 women with computing professions in a room. This task was realised during the 2006 Grace Hopper Celebration of Women and Computing. I don't think I've ever known 100 women let alone 1000 and never would I have believed there would be this many females doing computer science.

But guess what? There are! And many of them have come together in celebration of past, present and future generations of women and their accomplishments in fields where they are disadvantaged.

The women I met at this event were truly inspirational. The keynote speakers were definitely well selected and as I type, their voices still ring in my head with the messages they send.

On day one, Shirly Tilghman spoke about how when she closes her eyes, she can see women in engineering disciplines. This is how she differs from men referees because when they close their eyes, they cannot mentally picture females in those positions. This limits the candidate pool. Where as women can broaden their views to include women in the vision.

On day two, Sally Ride suggested the only reason women were not choosing engineering careers was because of the conditioning and pressures of the male dominated society. She experienced first hand the reverse of the roles when she became the first female astronaut. Due to the large amount of media surrounding her flight, 5 year old boys wondered if little boys could grow up to become astronauts. To create such questioning implies the media can produce enormous amounts of pressure on how society can perceive certain events.

Finally, on day three Helen Greiner gave us some insight into her company and the journey towards marketing her creations. Anything is possible in computer science and these women prove it.