The First Europe-China Workshop on Big Data Management

Some attenders of this workshopThe first Europe-China workshop on big data management was successfully held on the 16th of May, 2016 at the Department of Computer Science, University of Helsinki. 

This one-day workshop organized by Prof. Jiaheng Lu (University of Helsinki), Prof. Xiaoyong Du (Renmin University of China), and Prof. Christian S. Jensen (Aalborg University, Denmark). The aims of this workshop were to gather experts in big data management to exchange views on cutting-edge data management problems and create opportunities for establishing new collaborations between EU and China computer scientists.

The local host Prof. Jiaheng Lu delivered the opening speech and the department head, Prof. Sasu Tarkoma introduced the research achievements of the department. Then ten speakers gave high-quality talks, which covered diverse topics on big data management, such as big data implementations, big data cleansing, spatial data, social media data, cognitive data, cloud data, graph data, streaming data and real-life examples for big data. The invited speakers were Dr. Mohammad Hoque (University of Helsinki), Heikki Hämäläinen (Eficode Oy, Finland), Prof. Hua Lu (Aalborg University), Prof. Shuai Ma (Beihang University, China), Prof. Nikos Mamoulis (University of Ioannina, Greece), Prof. Jianliang Xu (Hong Kong Baptist University), Prof. Ge Yu (Northeastern University, China), Prof. Demetris Zeinalipour (University of Cyprus), Prof. Xiaofang Zhou (University of Queensland, Australia and Soochow University, China) and Prof. Yongluan Zhou (University of Southern Denmark).

 

Prof. Sasu Tarkoma talked on the research in the department

Photo 2: Prof. Sasu Tarkoma talked on the research at the department.

 

Some audiences in the workshop

Photo 3: Some audience in the workshop.

 

Big data management is the organization, administration and governance of large volumes of structured, semi-structured and unstructured data. The goal of big data management is to ensure a high level of data quality and accessibility for business intelligence and big data analytics applications.

More than thirty professors and students joined this workshop. The organization of workshop was assisted by PhD students Pengfei Xu, Heli Helskyaho and Chao Zhang. The presentation topics and slides about this workshop can be found at http://udbms.cs.helsinki.fi/BigData2016/.

 

Created date

17.06.2016 - 11:05

Brain poetry

In the latest research result of the month section, we interview PhD student Jukka Toivanen about his recent work on brain poetry in the Discovery group led by professor Hannu Toivonen. How can humans and machines be creative together?

Kjell Lemström to be new Head of Studies

Since Jaakko Kurhila left the department to head the Open University, we had to find a new university lecturer to act as head of studies in short order. We received a total of 28 applications. Out of these, and after a preliminary qualification round, evaluations, interviews, and a department council hearing, Kjell Lemström (KL) was elected for the post. He started working as the department's Head of Studies on 2 March 2015, so the Head of the department (JP) conducted the following induction interview that very week.

This is by no means the first time Kjell has been employed by the department. He defended his thesis on ‘String Matching Techniques for Music Retrieval’ in 2000, and has held numerous teaching and research positions both before and after that, until he transferred to the Laurea University of Applied Sciences in 2011 (luckily, that was only temporary).

Head of Studies Jaakko Kurhila to head Open University

The Head of Studies at the department, University Lecturer Jaakko Kurhila, has been elected to the post of director of the Open University at the University of Helsinki. It was a tough race: all in all, 39 applicants sought the post, some of them through the Mercuri Urval headhunting process. After a consultant evaluation, interviews, and aptitude assessments, the preparatory committee for the post, the steering committee for the Open University, and the rector of the university came to a unanimous decision to select Jaakko, and the contract is already being drawn up.

Being selected from this prestigious group of applicants, and after such a thorough process, is indisputable proof of the qualifications of Jaakko and the high esteem the academic community has for him. The department extends its warmest congratulations to Jaakko for this career development and is proud of the success of its protégé.

Bridging the Gap Between Research and Standardization

In the fourth research result of the month, we report a joint work between the UH NODES group and the Cambridge NetOS group, lead by Prof. Sasu Tarkoma and Prof. Jon Crowcroft, respectively. Their work recently received the best paper award "Best of CCR" from ACM SIGCOMM.