domingo, 23 de setembro de 2012

38th International Conference on Very Large Data Bases

In the last month, I've attended the 2012 edition of the VLDB conference in Istanbul, Turkey. VLDB is   a top-tier conference in computer science with a focus on data management. I consider SIGMOD (ACM) and ICDE (IEEE) to be "sisters" of VLDB in the computer science conference family. My paper entitled Mining attribute-structure correlated patterns in large attributed graphs, written in collaboration with Wagner Meira Jr. and Mohammed Zaki,  was presented as part of the Graph Statistics and Summarization Session of VLDB. Moreover, I had the opportunity to watch many other talks, interact with the data management research community in general, and get to know the beautiful city of Istanbul.

About my talk, I think it was one of the best ones I've given so far. In fact, I was a little bit nervous about this talk, since it was my first one in a major CS conference. To make things even harder, my current advisor and my two past advisors were in the audience -- some people feel more comfortable with a familiar audience, but in my case it works exactly the other way around. I've put a good amount of work on the preparation of the slides, but I still have to improve my slide design skills a lot. My main goal was to combine textless slides with a clear speech. As expected, the speech part was the most challenging one. In the end, I finished my talk on time and also answered one question about it. Moreover, the overall feedback I've received after the talk was mostly positive.

Regarding the other presentations, I was able to watch some of them. However, choosing which session to attend among 7 parallel sessions was difficult. I hope someday they will develop some kind of session recommendation for these big conferences, so that you upload some of your papers and then get a list of sessions/talks aligned with your interests. I've attended all they keynote talks, but did not really pay attention to them. In my experience, keynote talks are usually boring and I've never been able to get something useful out of them. On the other hand, I've enjoyed the research sessions a lot. Here is the list of the talks I've attended:


  1. Size-I Object Summaries for Relational Keyword Search;
  2. Injecting Uncertainty in Graphs for Identify Obfuscation;
  3. Measuring Two-Event Structural Correlations on Graphs;
  4. Efficient Reachability Query Evaluation in Large Spatiotemporal Contact Datasets;
  5. Boosting Moving Object Indexing through Velocity Partitioning;
  6. Multiple Location Profiling for Users and Relationships from Social Network and Content;
  7. Fast and Exact Top-k Search for Random Walk with Restart;
  8. The Filter-Placement Problem and Its Applications to Minimizing Information Multiplicity;
  9. Labeling Workflow Views with Fine-Grained Dependencies;
  10. gSketch: On Query Estimation in Graph Streams;
  11. Answering Top-k Queries Over a Mixture of Attractive and Repulsive Dimensions;
  12. Bayesian Locality Sensitive Hashing for Fast Similarity Search
  13. Challenging the Long Tail Recommendation;
  14. Ranking Large Temporal Data;
  15. Indexing the Earth Mover's Distance Using Normal Distributions;
  16. Stochastic Databases Cracking: Towards Robust Adaptive Indexing in Main-Memory Column-Stores;
  17. A Moving Object Index for Efficient Query Processing with Peer-Wise Location Privacy;
  18. A Data-Based Approach to Social Influence Maximization;
  19. The Complexity of Social Coordination;
  20. Who Tags What? An Analysis Framework;
  21. Whom to Ask? Jury Selection for Decision Making Tasks on Micro-blog Services;

As soon as I set my reading pace to normal levels again, I may summarize some of these papers here.


Visiting Istanbul was an amazing experience. The city has a great history -- former capital of the Byzantine and the Ottoman Empires -- that can still be explored through museums, mosques, churches, castles, etc. Also, the city's topography and hydrography -- the city is divided by the Bosphorus Strait and the Golden Horn -- provides great views from several parts of the city. The picture included in this post was taken during a boat tour through the Bosphorus Strait. it shows the Yoros Castle and the Turkish flag. Because VLDB took place during the Victory Day, which is a very important national holiday to remember the independence of Turkey, we got used to see Turkish flags all over the city.






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