Database pioneer and 2014 ACM Turing Award winner Michael Stonebraker, Ph.D., will deliver the keynote speech “Tackling Data Curation” at the 9th Annual MIT Chief Data Officer & Information Quality Symposium on July 22, 2015 in Cambridge, Mass. Symposium attendees will learn why data curation continues to frustrate Chief Data Officers in delivering high-quality, integrated data from diverse data sources to all the people, analytic tools and applications that demand it ─ the Holy Grail of big data. Meanwhile, data lakes, self-service analytics, Hadoop/NoSQL and other new big data architecture intensify demand.
Professor Stonebraker, an adjunct professor at MIT CSAIL, will challenge the conventional wisdom: that scalable data curation can be achieved with incrementally better versions of traditional curation approaches (such as ETL or Master Data Management) or with machine learning/intelligence alone. He’ll describe a new approach ─ machine-driven but human-guided ─ and show how businesses are benefiting from it in big pharma, financial services, information services and manufacturing.
Professor Stonebraker, Professor Ihab Ilyas of the University of Waterloo, and their colleagues first articulated the problem and a proposed solution in their 2013 research paper “Data Curation at Scale: The Data Tamer System.”
Tamr, a Cambridge, Mass.-based company co-founded by Professor Stonebraker, has since developed commercial software for scalable data integration, unification and curation. Tamr will be demonstrating its software at Booth 2 during the symposium.
Professor Stonebraker has said “Tamr’s technology and approach to scalable data unification will be the next big thing in data and analytics ─ similar to how column-store databases were the next big thing in 2004.”
The A.M Turing Award, often called the “Nobel Prize of Computing,” is named for Alan M. Turing, the British mathematician who articulated the mathematical foundation and limits of computing. The 2014 award to Professor Stonebraker recognizes his extensive contributions to modern database systems, including founding Tamr and eight other start-up companies to commercialize database technologies. Said the ACM in bestowing the award “[Michael] Stonebraker invented many of the concepts that are used in almost all modern database systems … Source code from Stonebraker’s systems can be found in many modern database systems.”
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