News

SPEC Distinguished Dissertation Award for Kai Sachs

The SPEC Research Group has awarded DVS alumnus Dr.-Ing. Kai Sachs with the SPEC Distinguished Dissertation Award 2011 for his doctoral dissertation titled "Performance Modeling and Benchmarking of Event-Based Systems".

The SPEC Distinguished Dissertation Award was established in 2011 to recognize outstanding dissertations within the scope of the SPEC Research Group in terms of scientific originality, scientific significance, practical relevance, impact, and quality of the presentation.

Best Paper Award for myHealthAssistant

The Best Paper Award of the International Conference on Body Area Networks is granted to Christian Seeger, Alejandro Buchmann, and Kristof Van Laerhoven for the paper titled myHealthAssistant: A Phone-based Body Sensor Network that Captures the Wearer's Exercises throughout the Day.

Please visit the myHealthAssistant webpage for more information.

Prüfungstermine

Die aktuellen Prüfungstermine hängen aus. Sie finden die Prüfungstermine von Prof. A. Buchmann hier, und die von Herr U. Gräf hier.
Bitte notieren, dass die Termine vom Mittwoch, 12.10, auf Freitag, den 14.10 verlegt wurden.

Talk by Leendert Wienhofen (SINTEF / NTNU Trondheim)

Title: "Handling Events in a Clinical Environment"

Time: Tuesday September 27th 2011, 2:00 pm

Location: S202 / A102

Abstract: In this talk, we present an approach for contextualizing an event-based decision support system for scheduling patient assessments in a hospital. Through observations of a specific workflow in a Norwegian University Hospital, we found that the clinical environment offers a number of challenges that seem under-addressed in current event-related literature.

For example: To cope with unexpected delays, patient coordinators often pursue a worst case scenario when scheduling patient assessments, leading to an underutilization of human resources and equipment when the procedure went without complications. We present a context-based decision support system for patient planning that helps the patient coordinator with taking well-informed rescheduling decisions and anticipating changes in other patients' schedules. The system uses information and events produced by medical equipment. As these events can be nondeterministic, we demonstrate how our domain specific context model can be used to contextualize events to enhance their quality and ascertain their meaning.

We are currently implementing the system and have already found that traditional approaches do not fit our perspective. Reasons for this will be given during the talk.

The talk will mainly be about representing a "version" of the real world based digital information which was not meant for the purpose that it is used for. An explanation by use of a real life use case (see above) from a hospital that indicate the need for a notion of quality, both event quality and information quality will be addressed.

Short Bio: After finishing his B.Eng in The Netherlands, Leendert Wienhofen started working for CognIT a.s in Oslo as a knowledge engineer in 2000. He has mostly been working on EU research projects with a focus on a combination of ontologies, semantic web related technology, mobile platforms and business processes. In 2006, he started working for SINTEF ICT, Scandinavia's largest independent research institute and continued working on projects mostly related to mobile, context aware technology. In 2009 he started working on a PhD at NTNU with the main research focus on quality in event processing technology applied in hospitals. Getting the right information to the right person at the right time has always been one of the main topics in his work

Organizers: Prof. A. Buchmann, Sebastian Frischbier

Talk by Dr. Goetz Graefe

Talk by Dr. Goetz Graefe, HP Fellow
on Fr. 16. September, 10:30 am in S2|02, C120/C110

Title: Advanced key structures in B-tree indexes

Abstract: A large amount of planning and coding is required in order to fully support database index structures such as B-trees. No other index structure has received as much attention from database researchers and software developers. By careful and creative construction of B-tree keys, however, additional indexing capabilities can be enabled with few, if any, modifications within the core B-tree code. This talk will survey a variety of them. This power and flexibility of B-trees suggests that B-trees will remain interesting, ubiquitous, and dominant for years to come.
Short Bio: Dr. Goetz Graefe, HP Fellow, joined HP Labs in 2007 to pursue research into database management. He spent 12 years in product development at Microsoft after several years in academic research and teaching. His publications can be found in ACM Computing Surveys as well as leading journals and conferences in the database field. They have been honored by an ACM SIGMOD "Test of time" award as well as the inaugural IEEE Data Engineering "Influential paper" award. His research has been adopted by Sequent (now IBM), Informix (now IBM), Texas Instruments, Tandem (now HP), Microsoft, and others.

DVS Paper at TPCTC 2011

SI-CV: Snapshot Isolation With Co-Located Versions. Robert Gottstein, Ilia Petrov, Alejandro Buchmann. TPC Technology Conference on Performance Evaluation & Benchmarking. (TPCTC 2011) co-located with VLDB 2011

DVS Demo & Poster at SIGCOMM 2011

We are presenting a demo and a poster on this year's ACM SIGCOMM conference in Toronto, Canada. The demo An Online Gaming Testbed for Peer-to-Peer Architectures by Max Lehn, Christof Leng, Robert Rehner, Tonio Triebel, and Alejandro Buchmann shows the current state of our P2P online gaming testbed with the game Planet PI4. The poster Designing a Testbed for Large-scale Distributed Systems by Christof Leng, Max Lehn, Robert Rehner, Alejandro Buchmann discusses state-of-the-art techniques for the development and evaluation of distributed applications.

DVS Paper Accepted at CSDM 2011

The paper FIT for SOA? Introducing the F.I.T. - Metric to Optimize the Availability of Service Oriented Architectures by Sebastian Frischbier, Alejandro Buchmann and Dieter Pütz is accepted at the Complex Systems Design & Management (CSDM) 2011 conference.

DVS Paper Accepted

On The Performance Of Database Query Processing Algorithms On Flash Solid State Disks. Daniel Bausch, Ilia Petrov, Alejandro Buchmann Sixth International Workshop on Flexible Database and Information System Technology (FlexDBIST). September, 2011.

Talk by Prof. Peter Pietzuch (Imperial College London)

Date:	Wednesday, June 8th, 10:30am
Location:	Robert Piloty Building (S2|02), Room: S2|02 A102
Speaker:	Peter Pietzuch, Department of Computing, Imperial College London
Topic:	Secure Distributed Applications using Information Flow Control

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Abstract:

Ensuring the confidentiality and integrity of data in distributed healthcare or financial applications is challenging. Developers may introduce unintended or deliberate security flaws in different parts of an application, which may lead to the disclosure of sensitive data. While access control mechanisms and source code auditing are used in practice to avoid security flaws, security violations are nevertheless a frequent occurrence.

Instead of avoiding all security flaws, I introduce our work on providing a "safety net" to distributed applications that prevents sensitive data disclosure from happening. Our approach is to use information flow control (IFC) to track the flow of data through a complex, heterogeneous distributed application and constrain undesirable flows that could violate data protection policy. I describe our DEFCon middleware that applies the IFC model to event-based systems in Java, after adding support for strong isolation between objects to the Java runtime. In addition, I present our recent work on PHP Aspis, which uses IFC to protect PHP web applications against injection vulnerabilities.

New DVS Paper

Page Size Selection for OLTP Databases on SSD RAID Storage. Ilia Petrov, Robert Gottstein, Todor Ivanov, Daniel Bausch, Alejandro Buchmann In Journal of Information and Data Management,Vol.2,No 1 (2011)

Talk by Prof. Johannes Gehrke (Cornell University, USA)

Date:	Monday, May 2nd, 16:15
Location:	Robert Piloty Building (S2|02), Room: S2|02 C110
Speaker:	Prof. Johannes Gehrke, Cornell University, USA
Topic:	Playing Games with Databases

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Abstract:

Scalability is a fundamental problem in the development of computer games and massively multiplayer online games (MMOs). Players always demand more --- more polygons, more physics particles, more interesting AI behavior, more monsters, more simultaneous players and interactions, and larger virtual worlds.

Most game developers think of databases as persistence solutions, designed to store and read game state. But the advantages of database systems go way beyond persistence. Database research has dealt with the question of efficiently processing declarative languages, and the resulting research questions have touched many areas of computer science.

In this talk, I will show how the idea of declarative processing from databases can be applied to computer games and simulations. I will then discuss how we can use ideas from optimistic concurrency control to scale interactions between players in MMOs, and I will conclude by describing how we can use these techniques to build elastic transaction processing infrastructure for the cloud.

About Johannes Gehrke:

Johannes Gehrke is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Cornell University. Johannes' research interests are in the areas of database systems, data mining, data privacy, and applications of database and data mining technology to marketing and the sciences. Johannes has received a National Science Foundation Career Award, an Arthur P. Sloan Fellowship, an IBM Faculty Award, the Cornell College of Engineering James and Mary Tien Excellence in Teaching Award, the Cornell University Provost's Award for Distinguished Scholarship, a Humboldt Research Award, and the 2011 IEEE Computer Society Technical Achievement Award. He is the author of numerous publications on data mining and database systems, and he co-authored the undergraduate textbook Database Management Systems (McGrawHill (2002), currently in its third edition), used at universities all over the world. Johannes is also an Adjunct Associate Professor at the University of Tromsø in Norway.

Johannes was co-Chair of the 2003 ACM SIGKDD Cup, Program co-Chair of the 2004 ACM International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD 2004), Program Chair of the 33rd International Conference on Very Large Data Bases (VLDB 2007), and Program co-Chair of the 28th IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE 2012). From 2007 to 2008, he was Chief Scientist at FAST, A Microsoft Subsidiary. At Cornell, Johannes teaches in the Department of Computer Science, the Information Science Program, and in the Johnson Graduate School of Management. He has extensive industry experience as technical advisor and consultant.

Johannes Gehrke's web page.

DVS participates in new LOEWE Research Priority Program: Cooperative sensor communication - Cocoon

Research in the field of wireless sensor communication will enable us to make an essential contribution to the improvement of our daily life. Sensors we consider in our research include environmental sensors, mobile phones, PDAs, navigation equipment, car keys, electronic purses or pulse rate measurement devices. New diverse applications, which can be integrated into the context of a smart city, will arise. This concept requires an intelligent environment in which daily life supporting services are ubiquitous. Here is a link to the recent press release. Project homepage.

No Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing on Thursday, 14.04.11

The lecture Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing on Thursday, 14.04.2011 at 11:40, is canceled. The next lecture will take place Tuesday, 19.04.2011.

New Lecture (6CP):
Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing (BiDw)

The course covers the foundations of Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing from architectural, algorithmic and practical perspective. In addition it covers new trends such as Data Warehouse Appliances, Cloud Analytics, Column Stores and the use of flash memory. The course replaces its predecessor-Data Warehousing. The lecture includes a hands-on practical exercise, in which we shall demonstrate different systems and techniques. More information

New Lecture (6CP): Distributed Reactive Software Systems (DReSS)

Many of today's software systems rely on predictable and stable information flows. Due to the digitalization of the world, these flows become increasingly more complex and dynamic. Thus, tomorrow's software systems have to become more distributed and reactive. Those Distributed Reactive Software Systems (DReSS) are best realized with event-based systems. In our new lecture we discuss state of the art research and provide hands-on experience in implementing a ready-to-use event-based system which will process real-time event data from our sensors. Further information

Oral exams

The oral exams with Prof. Buchmann will take place between April 4 and April 7 at room S2/02 D108.
Detailed Schedule

The oral exams with Ulrich Gräf will take place April 8 at room S2/02 D108.
Detailed Schedule

For questions regarding the exam schedule contact paeckel(at)dvs...

New DVS Book Chapter

A book chapter entitled 'Virtualization and Column-oriented Database Systems' is to appear in a book 'Grid and Cloud Database Management' jointly edited by G. Aloisio and S. Fiore and published by Springer Verlag. The book chapter is authored by I. Petrov, V. Polonskyy and Prof. A. Buchmann.

Paper accepted at CSMR 2010

The joint paper Towards an Estimation Model for Software Maintenance Costs by DVS, Archimetrica and Deutsche Post AG is accepted for presentation at the 15th European Conference on Software Maintenance and Reengineering. Contact at DVS is Sebastian Frischbier.

Celebration on the Occasion of the 60th Birthday of Prof. Buchmann, Prof. Huss and Prof. Walther

Last Friday, November 19th, the entire Dept. of Computer Science jointly celebrated the 60th. birthday of Prof. Alejandro Buchmann as well as Prof. Sorin Huss and Prof. Christoph Walther. After a series of technical and laudatory speeches dedicated to each of the honored professors, an artistic photograph was given to them (one reproduced to the left). I think there is something wrong with your arithmetic ... Alex and I are about the same age, and he and I cannot be getting close to 60. Hector Garcia-Molina For this occasion, in addition, a Festschrift in honor of Prof. Buchmann was officially presented. Edited by DVS members and published by Springer, the Festschrift contains 20 invited contributions from fields related to Prof. Buchmann's research interests. The book is available at Springer, or online via SpringerLink.

Paper accepted at SOC-LOG 2010

The paper Event-Driven Services: Integrating Production, Logistics and Transportation is accepted for presentation at the 2nd International Workshop on Service Oriented Computing in Logistics.

Abstract: Today's production processes are characterized by global supply chains, short lifecycles, and an increasing personalization of goods. To satisfy the demands for agility we must integrate the production with the logistics processes and knowledge about the underlying transportation services and infrastructure. This requires continuous monitoring and reacting to events. We show how event processing and service orientation can be combined into an effective delivery platform for an integrated coordination of the flow of goods.