Community Systems: The World Online
Professor Raghu Ramakrishnan, YAHOO! RESEARCH
Abstract
The Web is about you and me. Until now, for the most part, it has denoted a corpus of information that we put online sometime in the past, and the most celebrated Web application is keyword search over this corpus. Sites such as del.icio.us, flickr, MySpace, Slashdot, Wikipedia, Yahoo! Answers, and YouTube, which are driven by user-generated content, are forcing us to rethink the Web –– it is no longer just a static repository of content; it is a medium that connects us to each other. What are the ramifications of this fundamental shift? What are the new challenges in supporting and amplifying this shift?
Short Biography
Raghu Ramakrishnan is VP and Research Fellow at Yahoo!
Research, where he heads the Community Systems group. He is on
leave from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he is
Professor of Computer Sciences, and was founder and CTO of
QUIQ, a company that pioneered question-answering communities
such as Yahoo! Answers, and provided collaborative customer
support for several companies, including Compaq and Sun. His
research is in the area of database systems, with a focus on
data retrieval, analysis, and mining. He has developed scalable
algorithms for clustering, decision-tree construction, and
itemset counting, and was among the first to investigate mining
of continuously evolving, stream data. His work on query
optimization and deductive databases has found its way into
several commercial database systems, and his work on extending
SQL to deal with queries over sequences has influenced the
design of window functions in SQL:1999. His paper on the Birch
clustering algorithm received the SIGMOD 10-Year Test-of-Time
award, and he has written the widely-used text "Database
Management Systems" (WCB/McGraw-Hill, with J. Gehrke), now in
its third edition.
He is Chair of ACM SIGMOD, on the Board of Directors of ACM
SIGKDD and the Board of Trustees of the VLDB Endowment, and has
served as editor-in-chief of the Journal of Data Mining and
Knowledge Discovery, associate editor of ACM Transactions on
Database Systems, and the Database area editor of the Journal
of Logic Programming. Dr. Ramakrishnan is a Fellow of the
Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), and has received
several awards, including a Distinguished Alumnus Award from
IIT Madras, a Packard Foundation Fellowship, an NSF
Presidential Young Investigator Award, and an
ACM SIGMOD Contributions Award.