The database group at the University of Washington

Abstract

The database group at the University of Washington (UW) was founded in 1998 when the department hired Alon Halevy (now at Google). The group currently consists of about twenty researchers: three faculty members (the authors), four postdocs, and fifteen students. Alumni include faculty members at Computer Science Departments at British Columbia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Stanford, UMass, Wisconsin, one faculty member at the CMU Tepper School of Business, and several researchers and engineers at Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Nokia, Twitter, and other technology companies. The group has funding from NSF, the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and several companies including Amazon, EMC, Google, HP, Intel, Microsoft, NEC, and Yahoo. The group has been recognized through several best paper awards and two ACM SIGMOD Best Dissertation Awards.We conduct research mostly in small groups and tackle a diverse set of data management challenges. Some of our projects result from collaborations with domain scientists on the UW campus; others are sparked by novel theoretical breakthroughs that lead to new approaches to data management challenges; many are the results of both. We give here a short overview of the recent research themes in our group; more details are available on our website: http://db.cs.washington.edu/ SCIENTIFIC DATA MANAGEMENTOur research agenda is partially derived from collaborations with scientists across the University of Washington and beyond, leveraging our close connection with the University of Washington eScience Institute [6].The eScience Institute was founded in 2005 with the goal of advancing the research and practice of dataintensive discovery across all fields of science. With the advent of new, high-bandwidth data sources (survey telescopes, high-throughput sequencers, ubiquitous sensor networks, planetary-scale simulations), data management research became recognized as a critical driver of scientific discovery. As a result, the database group and the eScience Institute became close partners, and were able to initiate and maintain multiple long-term collaborations with scientists.In 2008, we founded an inter-disciplinary research group called AstroDB [1]. This group brings together faculty, research scientists, postdocs, and students from the Astronomy department and our database group. In 2009, we initiated an independent collaboration with a marine microbiology lab. Thanks to the sustained nature of these partnerships, both have led to a series of joint research projects. We give examples in the following sections.Our inter-disciplinary collaborations have also allowed us to collect a curated repository of datasets and use cases that anyone can use in their research: A repository of MapReduce applications [15], a public repository of scientific datasets equipped with a SQL interface [19], and a number of parallel analytics use cases that go beyond MapReduce [14]. We are continuously working on expanding these collections of applications. BIG DATA SYSTEMSMotivated b...