Laura Haas: Information for People September 17, 2008

Ordinary people have access to unprecedented volumes of information today. Researchers in the fields of information management (IM) and human-computer interaction (HCI) are reacting to this challenge from their own unique perspectives. Having access to a billion records is cool, but having access to a billion people is awesome. In this talk, we look at recent research from both communities, and speculate on how interactions between the communities could enhance the user experience of information.

Speaker Bio:

Laura Haas is an IBM Distinguished Engineer and Director of Computer Science at Almaden Research Center. Most recently, she was responsible for Information Integration Solutions (IIS) architecture in IBM's Software Group, after leading the IIS development team through its first two years. Dr. Haas joined the development team in 2001 as manager of DB2 UDB Query Compiler development. Previously, Dr. Haas was a research staff member and manager at IBM's Almaden Research Center for nearly twenty years. In Research, she worked on and managed a number of exploratory projects in distributed database systems. She is best known for her work on the Starburst query processor (from which DB2 UDB was developed), on Garlic, a system which allowed federation of heterogeneous data sources, and on Clio, the first semi-automatic tool for heterogeneous schema mapping. Garlic technology married with DB2 UDB query processing is the basis for WebSphere Information Integrator's federation capabilities, while Clio capabilities are a core differentiator for the new Rational Data Architect. Dr. Haas is an active member of the database community, serving as vice chair of ACM SIGMOD from 1989-1997, and, currently, as Vice President of the VLDB Board of Trustees, as well as on many program committees for technical conferences. She has received several IBM awards for Outstanding Technical Achievement, and an IBM Corporate Award for her work on federated database technology. She is a member of the IBM Academy of Technology, an ACM Fellow, and a member of the Board of Computing Research Associates.

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