A Summer of Computer Science, Research, Semantic Web, Databases, Graphs and Travel!

This has been a summer of Computer Science, Research, Semantic Web, Databases, Graphs and a lot of travel! In these past 4 months, I visited 10 countries and traveled over 72,000 miles; equivalent to going around the world 3 times. Whew! This is the summary of my summer travel. 

I attended the 11th Alberto Mendelezon Workshop on Foundations of Data Management. AMW is a scientific event with with a heavy attendance from database theory researchers. The hallway discussions are very insightful. I was the organizer of the Summer School and a presented a short paper titled “Ontology Based Data Access: Where do the Ontologies and Mappings come from?”I had a lot of enlightening conversations with Luna Dong from Amazon (working on creating the Product Knowledge Graph. Semantic web is involved), Julia Stoyanovich who gave a real thought provoking tutorial on Data Responsibility (we should all pay attention to this), Leonid Libkin (Nulls in databases are still an issue). I was thrilled to finally meet Dan Suciu, James Shanahan, Jan Van den Bussche among many other database gurus. It’s always a pleasure to hang out with the chilean database “mafia”: Marcelo Arenas, Pablo Barcelo, Leo Bertossi, Claudio Gutierrez, Aidan Hogan et al. Congrats to the local team for organizing a wonderful event, specially to Mariano Consens!

I flew into Montevideo and I was flying out from Buenos Aires. I got to spend a day and a half in this great city. I truly enjoyed it. I will have to come back! Blog post about my 36 hour visit to Buenos Aires will come soon.

I attended Graph Day where I had two talks “Do I need a Graph Database? If so, what kind?” and “Graph Query Language Task Force Update from LDBC”. My takeaways:

– AWS is figuring out what to do with Graphs

I attended the Dagstuhl Seminar “Federated Semantic Data Management”, organized by Johann-Christoph Freytag, Olaf Hartig and Maria Esther Vidal. On my way to Dagstuhl, I had the opportunity to stop in Koblenz to hang out with Steffen Staab.

We had extensive discussions on the state of the art in Federated Query Processing from the traditional Relational Databases and Semantic Web perspectives. The goal was to understand the limitations of current approaches in considering ontological knowledge during federated query processing. Federated Semantic Data Management (FSDM) can be summarized in one sentence: Being able to do 1) reasoning/inferencing over 2) unbounded/unknown sources. A couple interesting open challenges to highlight are the following:

1) Unbounded sources: In traditional federated data management, the number of sources is fixed. In FSDM, the number of sources may not be known. Therefore the source selection problem is harder.

2) Correctness: A relaxed version of correctness may need to be considered, a tradeoff between soundness/completeness and precision/recall.

3) Access control: This is still an open challenge even in traditional federated data management.

This is my third home. I try to swing by Zurich once a year. I spent a weekend at Bodensee and visited for the first time Säntis. I had the opportunity to visited Philippe Cudré-Mauroux at the University of Fribourg. We are the ISWC 2017 In-Use PC Chairs, so we had a face-to-face PC meeting. I also gave my talk “Integrating Relational Databases with the Semantic Web: past, present and future” for the first time. This talk is an 1 hour version of my upcoming lecture at the Reasoning Web Summer School in London.

What’s the best way to get from Zurich to London? Stopping for an entire day in Lisbon of course! Specially when you pay for the ticket with miles and $10USD. This was my first time in Lisbon. I arrived early morning, spent 6 hours walking around this amazing city. I also had the chance to have lunch with Sofia Pinto overlooking Lisbon and discuss ontology engineering! One of the best day layovers I have ever had. I have to come back. Blog post on the visit soon.

I was invited to be a lecturer of the 13th Reasoning Web Summer School (RW 2017). I delivered a half day lecture on Integrating Relational Databases with the Semantic Web. My lecture notes appear as a book chapter in the book Reasoning Web. Semantic Interoperability on the Web. It was great hanging out with good friends Axel Polleres, Andrea Cali. I finally got to meet for the first time Giorgos Stamou. Great conversations with Domenico Lembo on Ontology Based Data Access and Leo Bertossi on Inconsistent Databases and Data Quality. The highlight of this visit, and of my summer, was the conference dinner at the Royal Society where I sat next to Keith Clark and enjoyed a marvelous dinner speech by Bob Kowalski. Blog post on this event soon.

Client work took my all the way to Toronto. First time in Canada! So if it’s hot in Texas, might as well try to spend time in a cooler place. This is a great weekend getaway destination (in the summer): fantastic views, food and beer. I also had the chance to meet up with Mariano Consens and get a tour of the University of Toronto.

The Graph Query Language task force from the Linked Data Benchmark Council (LDBC) organized a face-to-face week meeting in Santiago, Chile to work on the proposal for a closed graph query languages where paths are first class citizens. A full week of hard work (we also had fun). I took advantage of this visit to visit my UT friends Lindsey Carte, Alvaro Quezada-Hofflinger and Marcelo Somos, professors at the Universidad de La Frontera in Temuco. I gave a talk in spanish “Integrating Data using the Semantic Web: The Constitute Use Case”. It is enjoyable challenge to give talks to non-computer scientists.

Back in February I found a Austin-Miami roundtrip ticket for $110. So why not! We discovered the Barrel of the Monks brewery in Boca Raton. This is a must if you are in that area and you like belgium beers!

I was invited to attend the STI Summit in Crete. My first time in Crete, and in Greece (I have never attended ESWC which is usually in Crete). Very intense couple of days talking about the future of Semantic Web research. Afterwards I visited Irini Fundulaki at FORTH and Giorgos Stamou at the National Technical University of Athens where I gave my talk on Integrating Relational Databases with the Semantic Web. I was very impressed with all the work on mappings that has been done in both of these groups. In both cases, the one hour talk turned into hours and hours of fruitful discussions. On my flight to Athens I met a fellow travel geek:72hrJetsettergirl. The next day, we randomly bumped into each other at the Acropolis. The sweet coincidences of life!

I attended the ACM Richard Tapia Celebration of Diversity in Computing. I have been attending this conference for 10 years, since I was a senior in college, all throughout my graduate studies and now has a PhD. This year, I was the Workshop and Panel Chair.  I had the chance to moderated a panel “From Research to Startup” with Rachel Miller from Asana (from theory/crypto research to startup), Kunle Olukotun, (Stanford professor and founder of multiple startups) and Andy Konwinski (PhD from UC Berkley and co-founder Databricks). I also was on another entrepreneur panel with Ayana Howard (Professor at Georgia Tech and founder of Zyrobotics) and Jamika Burge. Both panels had a mix of undergrad, grad students and even faculty interested in learning and entrepreneur experiences. We definitely had an amazing group of panelists. Kemafor Anyanwu Ogan invited me to be on her panel of Data Management for IoT. One of the highlights of the conference is to meet with former and new members of Hispanics in Computing including Manuel Pérez Quiñones (congrats on the Richard A. Tapia Achievement Award for Scientific Scholarship, Civic Science and Diversifying Computing!) and Dan Garcia. We missed you Jose Morales and Patti Ordonez!

I’m writing this post on my way back from Amsterdam. I had the opportunity to meet up with Peter Boncz and talk about Graph Query Language use cases. I also gave my talk “Integrating Relational Databases with the Semantic Web” at the VU Weekly Artificial Intelligence meeting. Great crowd and a lot of great questions. Nice seeing Frank van Harmelen and Javier Fernandez.

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The summer is well over. Fall is already in full force in Europe. But it is still feels like summer in Texas.