NWDS Annual Meeting 2018

Where:

Husky Union Building, Conference Room 250
University of Washington, Seattle

4001 E Stevens Way NE
Seattle, WA 98195

Parking information (tell the gate attendant that you will be heading to the Husky Union Building and you will be directed)

Wifi will be available to participants.

When:

Friday, January 5th, 8:30am - 7:00pm.

Description:

The Northwest Database Society Annual Meeting brings together researchers and practitioners from the greater Pacific Northwest for a day of technical talks and networking on the broad topic of data management systems.

Keynote: “Predictive Interaction,” Jeff Heer (UW CSE)

How might we architect interactive systems that have better models of the tasks we’re trying to perform, help refine ambiguous user intent, and scale to large or repetitive workloads? In this talk I will present Predictive Interaction, a framework for interactive systems that shifts some of the burden of specification from users to algorithms, while preserving human guidance and expressive power. The central idea is to imbue software with domain-specific models of user tasks, which in turn power predictive methods to suggest a variety of possible actions. I will illustrate these concepts with examples drawn from widely-deployed systems for data transformation and visualization (with reported order-of-magnitude productivity gains) and discuss related design considerations and future research directions.

Jeff Heer

Jeffrey Heer is an Associate Professor in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington, where he conducts research on data visualization, human-computer interaction (HCI), and social computing. The visualization tools developed by his lab and collaborators (Vega, D3.js, Protovis, Prefuse) are used by researchers, companies, and thousands of data enthusiasts around the world. His group's papers have received awards at the premier venues in visualization (IEEE InfoVis, VAST, EuroVis) and HCI (ACM CHI, UIST, CSCW). Other awards include MIT Technology Review's TR35 (2009), a Sloan Foundation Fellowship (2012), the ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award (2016), and the IEEE Visualization Technical Achievement Award (2017). Jeff holds BS, MS and PhD degrees in Computer Science from UC Berkeley, whom he then "betrayed" to join the Stanford faculty from 2009 to 2013. Jeff is also co-founder of Trifacta, a provider of interactive tools for scalable data transformation.

Agenda:

8:30 am Registration and coffee/tea

8:55 am Introduction (Magda Balazinska, UW CSE)

9:00 am Keynote talk: Predictive Interaction, Jeff Heer (UW CSE)

10:00 am Break

10:30 am Academic Talks (Session chair: Dan Suciu)

Academic Lightning Talks (Portland State, Evergreen State College, UW Tacoma, Seattle U, UW Bothell)
“Handling Heterogeneity in Representation, Communication, and Context,” Arash Termehchy (Oregon State University)
Understanding and Exploring: Schemas, Recommendations, and Provenance, Rachel Pottinger (University of British Columbia)
Speeding Up Data Science: From a Data Management Perspective, Jiannan Wang (Simon Fraser University)
Improved Practical Efficiency for Misinformation Prevention in Social Networks, Michael Simpson (University of Victoria)

12:00 pm Lunch

1:30 pm Industrial Talks (Session chair: Alvin Cheung)

Industrial Lightning Talks (Google, Qumulo, Teradata, Huawei, Tableau)
Visual Data Management System, Vishakha Gupta-Cledat (Intel)
Challenges and Innovations in Building a Product Knowledge Graph, Luna Dong (Amazon)
“DB Group Overview,” Jonathan Goldstein (Microsoft)
“Databases as source of data for Machine Learning,” Kestutis Patiejunas (Facebook)

3:00 pm Break

3:30 pm Academic Talks (Session chair: Magda Balazinska)