Welcome to the Northwest Database Society (NWDS)

Mission Statement

The goal of NWDS is to bring together researchers and practitioners in the field of databases and data management systems working in the Pacific North-West.

Upcoming Events

Speaker: Christoph Koch From Cornell

Title: MayBMS: A Probabilistic Database Management System

Where: University of Washington, Seattle.
Computer Science and Engineering Department.
Paul Allen Center, CSE-605.

When: 11:00 AM (Thursday, July 3rd, 2008)

Abstract:

Databases that contain uncertain data arise naturally in many data management scenarios, such as Web information extraction, data cleaning, data integration, sensor data management, and scientific databases. There are currently no scalable systems for managing and querying such databases. In this talk I present MayBMS, a database management system for efficiently managing and processing large collections of uncertain data that is currently under development at Cornell. MayBMS is based on a clean yet expressive query language that captures many important use cases of probabilistic databases, including what-if queries and the conditioning of databases using new evidence. MayBMS employs a carefully designed succinct representation system for probabilistic databases called U-relations, which nicely unifies various approaches to representing uncertain data, such as c-tables, relational decomposition, and probabilistic graphical models. U-relations allow for the natural reuse of mature relational storage, indexing and query processing techniques to build scalable probabilistic database systems. In addition to the exact processing of probabilistic database queries on U-relations, I discuss the efficient approximation of expressive, compositional queries on probabilistic databases.

Bio:

Christoph Koch is an associate professor of computer science at Cornell University. He is interested in both the theoretical and systems-oriented aspects of data management, and currently works on managing uncertain data, community data management systems, data-driven games, data integration, and Web information extraction and management.

Past Talks

• Sam Madden, MIT
• Chris Olston, Yahoo! Research
• Joseph M. Hellerstein, UC Berkeley
• Tova Milo, Tel Aviv University
• Anhai Doan, University of Wisconsin-Madison
• Deepak Patil, Microsoft
• David Maier, Portland State University
• Patrick Valduriez, INRIA-Rennes
• Daniel Abadi, MIT
• Mirek Riedewald, Cornell
• David Anderson, CMU
• Dennis Lee, Amazon
• Shankar Pal, Microsoft Research

Listed in reverse chronological order. Click here for Abstracts

Mailing List

Please sign up for the nwds mailing list here. We use this list primarily to send announcements for upcoming events. After you register, you can send mail to that list at nwds at cs...

Current Members

• Magdalena Balazinska, University of Washington
• Phil Bernstein, Microsoft Research
• Pedro Domingos, University of Washington
• Alon Halevy, University of Washington and Google
• Dennis Lee, Amazon
• Dan Suciu, University of Washington
• Pat Helland, Amazon
• George Fletcher, Washington State University

To become a member, please contact Magda

Student Members

• Xin (Luna) Dong, University of Washington
• Nodira Khoussainova, University of Washington
• Chris Re, University of Washington
• Nilesh Dalvi, University of Washington
• Roxana Geambasu, University of Washington
• YongChul Kwon, University of Washington
• Evan Welbourne, University of Washington
• Abhay Kumar Jha, University of Washington
• Brian DeRenzi, University of Washington
• Mike Carafella, University of Washington
• Vibhor Rastogi, University of Washington

To become a member, please contact Magda

History

The North-West Database Society was founded on January 1st 2006 by Dan Suciu and Magdalena Balazinska. It is inspired by the New-England Database Society.