Email: ASSourav@ntu.edu.sg
Institution: Nanyang Technological University (NTU)
Title: Don’t Make Me Learn: From Building for Coders to Building for Users
Abstract
Since the inception of data management research in the 70s, both academic and commercial efforts have been heavily skewed toward query paradigms that are based on textual query languages (e.g., SQL, XQuery, SPARQL). The underlying implicit (and sometimes explicit) assumption in this paradigm is that end users of data management services are skillful in formulating queries using these languages. In this talk, we question this assumption in the context of querying graph-structured data. Although it was true in the first decades of data management software development, we emphasize that current users are often resistant to learning complex query languages. We advocate that graph querying services need to embody direct manipulation-style of interaction in order to empower users in wider communities to use them. Importantly, we highlight that such querying paradigm opens up opportunities to further improve usability and performance of graph querying frameworks. Although in this talk we focus on graph-structured data, the ideas are broadly applicable to other types of data.
Biography
Sourav S Bhowmick is an Associate Professor in the School of Computer Science and Engineering (SCSE), Nanyang Technological University. He leads the data management research group (DANTe) in SCSE. His research areas include data management, human-data interaction, data analytics, computational social science and network biology. He has published more than 80 papers in top-tier venues such as VLDB, SIGMOD, WWW, SIGIR, ACM MM, Bioinformatics, Biophysical Journal, and VLDB Journal. He has received Best Paper Awards at ACM CIKM 2004 and ACM BCB 2011 for papers related to evolution mining and biological network summarization, respectively. His work on influence maximization was nominated for the best paper award in ACM SIGMOD 2015. Sourav regularly serves as a reviewer for data management, data mining, and bioinformatics conferences (e.g., SIGMOD, VLDB) and journals (e.g., VLDB Journal, Bioinformatics). He has served as a program chair/co-chair of several international conferences including IEEE BigComp 2018, DASFAA 2014, DEXA 2009, and DEXA 2008. Currently, he is serving as a group leader for SIGMOD 2019. He has been keynote and tutorial speakers for several international conferences. Sourav is a co-recipient of the VLDB Service Award in 2018 from the VLDB Endowment for his contribution in designing an efficient PVLDB proceedings management framework. Recently, he has co-authored books on “Summarizing Biological Networks” and “Human Interaction with Graphs”, which are published by Springer-Verlag (May 2017) and Morgan & Claypool (Aug 2018) publishers, respectively. He often waste his time by tinkering with paints and brushes.
