Date: Wednesday, 8 August 2007, 6:30 PM
Location: SAP LABS, Building D, 3410 Hillview Avenue,
Palo Alto, CA (Google
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Cost: Free and open to all who wish to attend, but membership is
only $10/year.
Topic
The Web is awash in textual information on every topic imaginable. But
the amount of hard data that can be usefully accessed on the Web remains
remarkably small, despite the potential for an Internet of people and their
computers to exploit data in ways that can improve their health, happiness
and bottom line.
Swivel is a site where users explore,
publish, compare, visualize, share and discuss data. Swivel combines web
technologies and user enthusiasm to liberate data from its traditional
vaults, allowing people to discover and share insights in that data.
The breadth of data sets and variety of interactions at Swivel raise new
opportunities and challenges in Data Mining, social networking, data visualization
and human-computer interaction. In this talk, we outline the concepts that
underlie Swivel, and highlight selected technical challenges that seem
ripe for investigation by the Data Mining community. As a community site
for data enthusiasts, we are also interested in dialog about the role Swivel
can play in accelerating innovation in the Data Mining arena more generally.
About the Speaker
Joseph M. Hellerstein is a Professor of Computer Science at the University
of California, Berkeley, specializing in data management and networking
systems. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin in 1995,
an M.S. from UC Berkeley in 1992, and an A.B. from Harvard in 1990. Hellerstein's
research has been recognized via awards including an Alfred
P. Sloan Research Fellowship, MIT Technology Review's inaugural TR100 list
of young leaders, and two ACM-SIGMOD Test
of Time awards. Key ideas from his research have been incorporated
into commercial and open-source database software released by IBM, Oracle,
and PostgreSQL. He has also held industrial posts including Director of Intel
Research Berkeley, and Chief Scientist of Cohera Corporation. He currently
chairs the Technical Advisory Board of Swivel.
Sara Wood is the Chief Data Officer for Swivel. Sara has spent the better
part of the last decade at institutions working with some of the world's
most important data: the World Health Organization, Harvard School of Public
Health, the UN and UNDP. Previous to that she worked for a number of technology
companies and research organizations, including web startups such as Salon.com,
where she helped to solve emerging issues of content and data management
on the web.
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