SIGMOD Panel
SIGMOD Panel: We are Drowning in a Sea of Least Publishable Units (LPUs)
David J. DeWitt (Microsoft Corporation); Ihab F. Ilyas (QCRI); Jeffrey Naughton (University of Wisconsin); Michael Stonebraker (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
Abstract
Our field is drowning in a sea of conference
submissions. We assert that the sheer number of papers
has begun to seriously hurt the quality of the work that the
field is doing and that the field is going to implode unless
we take action to remedy the situation. In order to improve
the quality of the papers being published we must reduce the
number being submitted. This will require a change in the
culture of our field where "more" is being equated to “better”
by both hiring and promotion committees. In this panel we will
explore some ideas for correcting the situation.
Bios
David DeWitt was a faculty member in the Computer
Sciences Department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison
from 1976 until he joined Microsoft as a Technical Fellow in
March 2008. He served as department chair from
1999 to 2004. Dr. DeWitt is a member of the
National Academy of Engineering and a Fellow of the American
Academy of Arts and Sciences. His pioneering
contributions to the field of parallel database systems were
recognized by ACM with the 2009 Software Systems
award. Currently, he manages the Jim Gray Systems
Laboratory in Madison for Microsoft.
Ihab Ilyas is a principal scientist at the Qatar
Computing Research Institute and an associate professor of
computer science at the University of Waterloo. He received
his PhD in computer science from Purdue University, West
Lafayette and his BSc and MSc in computer science from the
University of Alexandria. His main research is in the area of
database systems, with special interest in rank-aware query
processing, data quality, managing uncertain data, and
Information extraction. Ihab is an IBM CAS faculty fellow
since January 2006, a recipient of the Ontario Early
Researcher Award in 2008, and recently a co-founder of Data
Tamer, a new startup focusing on large scale data integration
and cleaning.
Jeff Naughton is John P. Morgridge Professor and Chair
of the Computer Sciences Department at the University of
Wisconsin-Madison. He received the National Science Foundation
Presidential Young Investigator Award, is an ACM Fellow, and
was a member of the GAMMA team that received the 2008 ACM
Software Systems Award. Professor Naughton has served as an
adviser or consultant to companies including Greenplum,
Microsoft, NEC, and Teradata.
Dr. Stonebraker has been a pioneer of data base
research and technology for more than a quarter of a
century. He was the main architect of the INGRES
relational DBMS, and the object-relational DBMS,
POSTGRES. These prototypes were developed at the
University of California at Berkeley where Stonebraker was a
Professor of Computer Science for twenty five years.
More recently at M.I.T. he was a co-architect of the
Aurora/Borealis stream processing engine, the C-Store
column-oriented DBMS, and the H-Store transaction processing
engine. Currently, he is working on
science-oriented DBMSs, OLTP DBMSs, and scalable data
curation. He is the founder of five venture-capital
backed startups, which commercialized his prototypes.
Presently he serves as Chief Technology Officer of VoltDB and
Paradigm4, Inc.
Professor Stonebraker is the author of scores of research
papers on data base technology, operating systems and the
architecture of system software services. He was awarded
the ACM System Software Award in 1992, for his work on
INGRES. Additionally, he was awarded the first annual
Innovation award by the ACM SIGMOD special interest group in
1994, and was elected to the National Academy of Engineering
in 1997. He was awarded the IEEE John Von Neumann award
in 2005, and is presently an Adjunct Professor of Computer
Science at M.I.T, where he is co-director of the new Intel
Science and Technology Center focused on big data.
