XLDB

Hi All!

It is time to start planning XLDB-2013 – the 7^th Extremely Large Databases Conference!

Dates & location
We fixed the dates and finally managed to officially reserve the venue, so mark your calendars! The event will take place on September 9-12, 2013, at the same location as last year: the Knight Management Center, Stanford University, CA, USA.  Similarly to how we run the event last year, we are planning to have a tutorial day on  Monday (9/9)^*, the main program on Tuesday & Wednesday (9/10-11), and the invitational workshop on Thursday (9/12).

Organizing committee
I have assembled the organizing committee, and will chair it as in the past. The members of the committee: Chaitanya Baru (SDSC), Stephen Brobst (Teradata), John Hax (Oracle), Alex Szalay (JHU), and Omer Trajman (WibiData). We have already started working on the agenda, and we hope to have a draft version in place by early May.

Call for tutorials, lightning talks & posters, and demonstrations
We are collecting proposals for tutorials, as well as abstracts for lightning talks / posters, and demonstrations (we promise to give more exposure to demos this year!). It is especially important to get a list of tutorials in place before the registration opens, so if you would like to propose a tutorial (or request one), get in touch with us soon. Lightning talk/poster abstracts deadline: mid-July, demonstration proposals deadline: beginning of July. Check out the conference website for details.

Registration
The registration will open in early May.

Website
Further details, including information on how to submit an abstract or a proposal, information for potential sponsors etc can be found at the conference website at xldb.org/2013.

So, mark your calendar, stay tuned, register after 5/1, and come to Stanford in September!

Best regards,
Jacek

—
^* We will have a tutorial day as last year provided we manage to identify the right tutorials. We expect to know for sure and confirm before the registration opens (early May)

Hi all,

We have the results from the best-lightning-talks survey: the top two speakers voted by the attendees are:

• Subha Madhavan: G-CODE Enables Actionable Clinical Knowledge from BIG DATA
• Magdalena Balazinska: Big-Data Analytics Usability

As announced at the XLDB-2012 conference, the top two speakers will get a longer speaking slot (most likely 30 or 45 min) at the XLDB-2013.

There were quite a few lightning talks that scored just below the top two. In fact, judging from the poll, the quality of almost all the talks was relatively uniform.

Congratulations to the winners, and we are looking forward to hearing your talks next year!

Jacek

For these interested in the array standard and algebra…

We created a permanent page for ArrayQL, see www.xldb.org/arrayql/.

We also created a mailing list which will be used for communication with the community about all ArrayQL related topics. This includes both the announcements from the core team, and the questions/comments from the community, if you are interested in following the development or interacting with the core team, asking questions etc, please subscribe (details on the arrayql webpage).

Lastly, if you would like to provide feedback regarding the draft standard and algebra announced at XLDB-2012, please try to do so in the next two weeks, we would like to finalize the first round of feedback by Oct 15, and incorporate received suggestions shortly after.

Regards,
Jacek

Hi All,

For those who did not have a chance to attend the XLDB-2012 event, here are a few highlights.

The conference attracted over 300 attendees, and across all 3 events (tutorials, conference, workshop) we had 360+ unique registrants.

Based on the feedback we are receiving and our own impressions, the XLDB-2012 events went very well: the speakers and the discussion panels were great; everybody seemed to love the venue at Stanford and enjoyed the food.

The tutorials (new this year!) were very popular, and the “experimental” non-seated dinner was a success.

We made several announcements at the conference, including the ArrayQL working group, the XLDB  Consortium initiative, and the dates/location of the next XLDB-satellite workshop (CERN/Geneva, June 25-26 2013).

If you missed our event, you can check out the slides, available through the conference program. The videos from the conference will be available some time in October, … but honestly, nothing will replace being there and networking with the attendees. If you don’t believe me, ask those who came! :)

See you next year!
Jacek Becla
XLDB-2012 Organizing Committee Chair