Academic Blog

Hello,

I’m on a two-week holiday in Malaysia and Indonesia. It’s warm. Wonderfully warm compared to Poland and Canada. My five-year-old son is happy. So I’m happy too.

The question is how to compute my happiness from data? Imagine that I’m a piece of data and there’s quite a lot of information about me – I’m on holidays, ICE is getting popular, rough set book project proceeds, etc. So imagine a query like “find people who are happy” or “find average degree of happiness among people who are on holidays”.

I think there are at least two issues arising here. The first one is of course how to translate the available data definitions into the concept of happiness. Well, maybe happiness is not the best practical example but one can imagine some important features of multimedia or biomedical objects that are not directly expressible within the given data semantics.

The second issue is whether we really need (or want) to know exact quantity of “average degree of happiness”? Isn’t it enough to know some reasonable approximation? Actually, one can consider a similar question in more (so far) realistic applications. For example, I recently reviewed a very good paper wherein the Author discussed approximations of the results of OLAP queries. You are also surely aware of several approximate SQL projects. Honestly, I don’t think those projects were commercially successful. On the other hand, isn’t it just a matter of time when database users will have to accept approximate queries?

Motivation for approximations may be related to such aspects as: increasing complexity of concepts occurring in queries (like “happiness”), increasing complexity of data sources (where availability of data is limited), or, simply, increasing volumes of queried data. It’s actually possible to do some fancy approximate querying with ICE but I’ll keep it for one of the next posts (when I come back from holidays). In the meantime, as usual, I open a new thread in the forum. - What do you think about the future of approximate querying?

Best greetings,

Dominik

Hello after a longer break,

I'd like to share with everyone some good news and bad news. The bad news is that there are academic projects where ICE cannot be applied. The good news is that there are academic projects where ICE fits perfectly and that we are organizing the contest for such projects in 2009.

The bad news is related to the following request from one of my academic colleagues: [i]I’d like to alter the query engine to use a new scheduling algorithm, and I’d like to alter the way transactional conflicts are dealt with (...)[/i]. Unfortunately, transactional model in ICE is not ready for this. It would be far better with IEE but we do not provide an access to IEE’s code. We do it only for ICE.

There is a new forum thread related to Academic Projects. I hope we'll discuss there what is (im)possible with ICE. Honestly, I’m very interested in transactional models, particularly in the context of modern data warehousing. However, I'm sure we'll find a plenty of other opportunities to do something with ICE. How about new compression algorithms or new knowledge nodes? How about applying ICE to analyze large real-life data or - as I wrote before - rewriting standard data mining algorithms to work with data via intelligently generated analytic SQL statements? I truly believe that all such ideas may lead to very interesting projects!

There is one more new thread, related to the DTA 2009 Contest. [i]DTA[/i] stands for [i]Database Theory and Application[/i]. It's the 2nd symposium in the series organized by the SERSC group in Korea. Every paper which refers to the usage of ICE can participate in the contest. All the papers with positive reviews will be accepted to the IEEE CS materials. The authors of the best project will be granted with free registration to DTA 2009.

My colleagues in SERSC have been always keen on promoting cooperation between academic and industry researchers. Hence, I'm sure the symposium presentations will be very interesting. We're looking forward to co-organizing more of such contests and cooperating on academic projects in the nearest future!

Best greetings,

Dominik