Three Brilliant Talks

Normally, I am not a big fan of Saturday conference settings (need I say why? :)  But I had agreed to Howard Ho's request to speak at the Web Intelligence 07 Conference sometime in April, and when he pinged me last week, I realized it was this Saturday.  Groan.  However, I perked up when I heard who else was speaking.  And the 45 min x 3 that I spent listening to the other speakers was one of the most enjoyable and learning experience I had.  So what got me excited?

The first talk I listened to was Alon Halevy's talk on Dataspaces.  Dataspaces is basically "pay as you go" integration, as opposed to traditional EII focused on getting it right the first time, resulting in a longer time to value.  I had read his dataspaces work before, so that in itself was not new to me (but I do urge my readers to either read the paper or read his slides).  But in the latter part of his talk, he followed it up with his real-world google experience that blew me away.  There are sooooooo many html tables available on the web, that a lot of web integration on structured data can happen by observing simple join columns -- dates, locations, states, countries etc etc...  When you have over 150 million tables available to do experiments, you come up with some pretty smart ways of integration based on "data" (and user query patterns).  He also had a humorous (to us, perhaps not to him) piece on how his fame (and fortune, after all, he is at Google :) is getting ahead of his achievements -- there was a recent article in eweek that correlated his work with the pagerank brouhaha, even though he had nothing to do with it.  And another tidbit on (no guess required here) on how the weekend that google base opened up, it was full of uploaded ... 

The second presentation was by Andrew Tomkins, ex-IBMer, currently at Yahoo.  And the third one was by Shivakumar Vaithyanathan.  More on these in my next post(s). 

All in all, a very enjoyable Saturday afternoon.

Comments

[Julio Santos]

Hi Anant, very interesting stuff on Dataspaces. Glad you decided to sacrifice your Saturday :)

[Alon Halevy]

Anant -- Thanks for the kind words! You forgot to mention the 4th brilliant talk, your own, that kicked off the afternoon. It's great to hear all the innovative developments at IBM around managing structured data.

And despite your disbelief, I ran and survived the half-marathon the following morning :)