This week, the 12th Alberto Mendelzon Workshop on Foundations of Data Management (AMW2018) takes place in Cali, Colombia. I have been coming to AMW since Cartagena, Colombia in 2014 and it has always been a fabulous event: strong scientific program, fun people and great organizations. I’m incredibly humbled, honored and excited to be the General Chair of AMW2018. It is a tremendous distinction to have the opportunity to be part of this distinguished event and share with my database friends and colleagues in Cali, Colombia, which is a place I call home.
AMW2018 has a fantastic program this week, and it is all thanks to the PC Chairs, Dan Olteanu (University of Oxford) and Barbara Poblete (University of Chile), the School Chairs, Jarek Szlichta (University of Ontario) and Domagoj Vrgoč (PUC Chile) and the authors of the 29 papers that will be presented.
The AMW School takes place during the first two days of the week with four tutorials:
– Denis Parra (PUC Chile): A Tutorial on Information Visualization and Visual Analytics
– Miriam Fernandez (Open University): Introduction to Mining Social Media Data
– Martin Ugarte (Free University of Brussels): Understanding the Bitcoin Protocol
– Fei Chiang (McMaster University): Introduction to Data Quality
The workshop takes place Wednesday through Friday. The 29 papers are organized in five sessions: data analytics, reasoning, query answering, and incomplete and probabilistic databases. All the papers have now been published in CEUR Workshop Proceedings Vol 2100. The workshop also has 4 keynotes that ranges from theory to practice topics:
– Miriam Fernandez (Open University) on AI for policing
– Hung Ngo (RelationalAI Inc) on worst-case optimal join algorithms
– Pablo Barcelo (University of Chile) on on reverse engineering problems for database query languages
– Vanessa Murdock (Amazon) on on large-scale analysis of user engagement
I am extremely grateful to the sponsors and the local organizing committee. We received generous support from VLDB Endowment and Cafeto Software. Thanks to their support, we are able to fund 25 students! The local organizers, Andres Castillo (Universidad del Valle) and Maria Constanza Pabon (Pontificia Universidad Javeriana Cali) have been a tremendous support on making this event happen.
Last but not least, given that AMW2018 is taking place in Cali, Colombia, this organization has become a family affair. My parents, and specially my mother, have been right by my side to make sure AMW2018 is a success. This event is taking place thanks to my mother! Gracias mami!
Hopefully you are now tempted to come to the next AMW, which will be somewhere in Latin America!