Keynote Speech 1:

Title: A funny thing happened on the way to production: Lessons learned while building internet-scale database systems Keynote Speaker: Dr. Brian Cooper, Software Engineer at Google.

Abstract: Take all the difficulties of building a general purpose database system. Combine that with the complexity of large scale distributed systems. Add in the challenge of managing operations for a variety of internet applications. Cloud database management systems aim to make development easier for application builders, but everything we do to make their lives easier makes our lives (as the system's builders) harder. I'll discuss some of the lessons the teams learned during the development of Yahoo!'s PNUTS and Google's Spanner database systems. For example, you won't get it right the first time so be prepared for change. You won't be able to predict how people use the system so be prepared for anything. I'll also discuss the need (and challenge) of comparing the performance of different cloud databases (a task we tackled with the YCSB benchmark.) I'll focus on problems that are unexpected, hard, and deserving of attention by clever researchers.

Speaker short-bio: Brian F. Cooper is a software engineer on the search team at Google. Previously, he was a principal research scientist at Yahoo! Research. His interests include web search, distributed information systems and databases. Before that, he was an assistant professor at Georgia Tech, where he worked on self-managing peer-to-peer overlays and distributed in-network event processing. His PhD dissertation examined adaptive overlays for replicating data, and for searching for the replicated data once it had been scattered throughout a network.

Keynote Speech 2:

Title: Big Data in the Context of Cloud Computing Keynote Speaker: Patrícia Florissi.

Abstract: EMC’s Chief Technology Officer for Sales, Patricia Florissi, believes we are at a very exciting tipping point in history from a sociological and scientific perspective. In her presentation, Mrs. Florissi will discuss how Cloud Economics — and the availability of scientific and social data — are the result of a convergence of forces that will usher in a new era of scientific enlightenment and social revolution. And how Cloud and Big Data are enabling and accelerating discoveries in science, and transforming the way we do business, work and live. Similar to the changes that occurred during the Industrial Revolution, many industries will cease to exist, new ones will be created, and others will reinvent themselves. Mrs. Florissi believes that those at the forefront of technology will want to be more than passive observers in this transformation; they will want to be thought leaders and actively show the way toward innovation.

Speaker short-bio: EMC’s chief technology officer Patricia Florissi believes we are at a very exciting tipping point in history from a sociological and scientific perspective. In her presentation, Ms. Florissi will discuss how technology—and the availability of scientific and social data—are the result of a convergence of forces that will usher in a new era of scientific enlightenment and social revolution. And how Big Data is enabling and accelerating discoveries in science, and transforming the way we do business, work and live. Similar to the changes that occurred during the Industrial Revolution, many industries will cease to exist, new ones will be created, and others will reinvent themselves. Ms. Florissi believes that those at the forefront of technology will want to be more than passive observers in this transformation; they will want to be thought leaders and actively show the way toward innovation. Ms. Florissi holds a PhD in Computer Science from Columbia University and is an EMC Distinguished Engineer. She graduated valedictorian with an MBA from New York University’s Stern Business School. She earned an MS and BS in computer science from the Universidade Federal de Pernambuco in Brazil. Dr. Florissi holds multiple patents and has been published in periodicals such as Computer Networks and IEEE Proceedings.