Keynote Speakers

Ontological query answering via rewriting

Abstract: Ontological databases extend traditional databases with ontological constraints. This technology is crucial for many applications such as semantic data publishing and integration as well as model-driven database design. For many classes of ontological constraints, query answering can be solved via query rewriting. In particular, given a conjunctive query and a set of ontological constraints, the query is compiled into a first-order query, called the perfect rewriting, that encodes the intensional knowledge implied by the constraints. Then, for every database D, the answer is obtained by directly evaluating the perfect rewriting over D. Since first-order queries can be easily translated into SQL, ontological query answering can be delegated to traditional DBMSs. This allows us to utilize all the query optimization techniques available in the underlying DBMS. We survey current approaches to rewriting-based query answering of ontological databases and we outline future research directions. Joint work with Giorgio Orsi and Andreas Pieris.

Georg Gottlob is a Professor of Computing Science at Oxford University and an Adjunct Professor at TU Wien. His interests include data extraction, database theory, graph decomposition techniques, AI, knowledge representation, logic and complexity. More recently, Gottlob has been interested in ontology-enhanced databases and ontological query-answering. He and his co-workers have introduced the Datalog+/- language family that uses Datalog variants for uniformly expressing both ontological rules and database integrity constraints. Gottlob has received the Wittgenstein Award from the Austrian National Science Fund, is an ACM Fellow, an ECCAI Fellow, a Fellow of the Royal Society, and a member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, the German National Academy of Sciences, and the Academia Europaea. He chaired the Program Committees of IJCAI 2003 and ACM PODS 2000 and is currently a member of the editorial boards of journals, such as CACM and JCSS. He is the main founder of Lixto, a company that provides tools and services for web data extraction. Gottlob was rexcently awarded an ERC Advanced Investigator's Grant.

Sponsored Search Auctions or How Web Search Engines Make Money

Abstract: For every user search web search engines determine relevant advertisements, called "Sponsored Links", and prices for them that the advertiser has to pay if the ad is clicked on. Usually the assignment and pricing is done based on an auction, called sponsored search auction. Thus hundreds of millions of sponsored search auctions are performed every day. More formally in sponsored search auctions a set of items, namely the ad positions on the search result page, have to be assigned prices and a set of advertisers has to be assigned to these items so that at the determined prices the advertisers are envy-free, i.e., do not want any other item more than their assigned item. In this talk I will present the state of the art in solving sponsored search auctions and also show how the problem fits into the larger space of research questions studied traditionally by economists.

Monika Henzinger is Professor at the Department of Computer Science at the University of Vienna, Austria, heading the Laboratory of Theory and Applications of Algorithms. Professor Monika Henzinger received her PhD in 1993 from Princeton University and then joined the Computer Science Department at Cornell University as assistant professor. In 1996, she became a member of technical staff at the Systems Research Center of Digital Equipment Corporation. A few years later, she joined Google as the Director of Research. From 2005 until 2009, she was a professor at the School of Computer& Communication Sciences of EPFL, heading the Laboratory of Theory and Applications of Algorithms. Professor Henzinger is a recipient of an NSF CAREER Award, an European Young Investigator Award, and a Top 25 Women on the Web Award and she is a co-recipient of the SOSP 1997 Best Paper Award.

On the Convergence of Data and Process Engineering

Abstract: Data engineering is a well-trodden field with established methods and tools that allow engineers to capture complex data requirements and to refine these requirements down to the level of database schemas in a seamless and largely standardized manner. Concomitantly, database systems and associated middleware enable the development of robust and scalable data-driven applications to support a wide spectrum of business functions. Eventually though, individual business functions supported by database applications need to be integrated in order to automate end-to-end business processes. This facet of information systems engineering falls under the realm of business process engineering. Business process engineering on the other hand is also an established discipline, with its own methods and tools. Process analysis and design methods typically start with process models that capture how tasks, events and decision points are inter-connected, and what data objects are consumed and produced throughout a process. These models are first captured at a high level of abstraction and then refined down to executable process models that can be deployed in business process management systems. The division between data and process engineering is driven by various factors, including the fact that data are shared across multiple processes, that data and processes evolve at different rates and according to different requirements. Notwithstanding these reasons, the divide between data and processes leads to redundancies in large-scale information systems that, in the long run, hinder on their coherence and maintainability. This talk will give an overview of emerging approaches that aim at bridging the traditional divide between data and processes. In particular, the talk will discuss the emerging "artifact-centric" process management paradigm, and how this paradigm in conjunction with service-oriented architectures and platforms, enable higher levels of integration and responsiveness to process change

Marlon Dumas is the Swedbank Professor of Software Engineering at University of Tartu, Estonia. He is also Strategic Area Leader at the Software Technology and Applications Competence Centre - a collaborative research center that gathers ten IT companies and two universities with the goal of conducting industry-driven research in software service engineering and data mining. From 2000 to 2007, he worked in the Business Process Management research group at Queensland University of Technology (Australia) where he held a Queensland State Fellowship between 2004 and 2007. He has also been visiting professor at University of Grenoble (France), University of Nancy (France), University of Macau, and Visiting Researcher at SAP Research. Professor Dumas has been co-recipient of best paper awards at ETAPS 2006 and BPM 2010. He is co-inventor of three granted patents in the field of business process technologies and co-editor of a textbook on Process-Aware Information Systems.

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