K. Selçuk Candan and Yi Chen were recently general co-chairs for ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of Data, one of the most prominent international conferences for researchers, teachers, scholars, industry leaders and students in database and data management fields.
Candan and Chen are professors of computer science and engineering in the School of Computing, Informatics, and Decision Systems Engineering.
Held in Scottsdale, the SIGMOD 2012 conference was presented by the Association of Computing Machinery – the world’s largest society focusing on computing – and its Special Interest Group on Management of Data. This event drew a near-record number of participants, almost 700 from 31 countries, including about 250 students.
The conference provided ASU faculty and students opportunities to interact with leading researchers in data management fields, Candan said, and helped ASU researchers make connections that could lead to partnerships for new research proposals and projects, especially in areas related to the “big data” challenge.
In addition to research paper sessions, the conference included industrial paper presentations, technical demonstrations, and workshops focusing on cutting-edge challenges. The program also included several mentorship sessions in which students could meet academic, research and industry leaders in the field.
ASU was one of the conference sponsors. Others included leaders in the information technology industry, such as SAP (data services company), EMC-Greenplum, IO Data Centers, Microsoft, Oracle, Google, IBM, LinkedIn, MarkLogic, Sybase, Turn, Twitter, Vertica, and VMware, Actian, AT&T, HP, Walmartlabs and Yahoo.
The conference received a record amount of industry sponsorship support. It also had support from the National Science Foundation, including support for students to travel to the event.
The conference focused on a broad range of computing issues, including cloud data management, large-scale data processing and analytics, data integration, data privacy and security, data visualization, mobile and sensor data networks, large-distributed data management, information retrieval, scientific databases, social networks and graph databases, and large-scale storage systems.
Among featured speakers was Patrick Hanrahan, a Stanford University professor and computer graphics and scientific visualization researcher who has won two Oscar awards for Technical Achievement and Engineering from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
