Tel-Aviv University - Computer Science DB Seminar
Sunday, January 4, 10-11
Despite the best efforts of Moore's Law, an invariant in computing is that certain tasks will always run slowly; for the forseeable future, large-scale data analysis will be the prime example of such a task. The standard user interface for such tasks is the "black box": users submit requests, wait while the computer silently processes, and receive answers. Data analysis is inherently an iterative process with complex inputs, and black-box processing is particularly frustrating in that context. The CONTROL project at Berkeley seeks to turn black-box processing into "crystal ball" processing, where users can observe the system in flight, see a prediction of the future outcome of the processing, and possibly "change the future" by modifying the processing on the fly. The work involves a mixture of query processing, statistics, and user interfaces. This talk gives an overview of work in the CONTROL project, including online query processing (implemented in the Informix database engine) and online data visualization.
For seminar schedule, see http://www.math.tau.ac.il/~matias/courses/sem-rep-ret.html