I'd rather play golf

Yesterday afternoon I listened to Alon Halevy of Google Research present a lecture at the Sybase-sponsored Database Seminar Series at the University of Waterloo. Alon’s talk was entitled “Bringing (Web) Databases to the Masses” – here is Alon’s abstract: The World-Wide Web contains vast quantities of structured data on a variety of domains, such as [...]

[Read more →]

This week my kids are attending Engineering Science Quest, a super-successful, week-long summer camp program at the University of Waterloo. They’ve been to ESQ before, but this year they’re attending the Tesla technology camp, exposing them to Computer Science rather than the physical sciences as in previous years. The UW undergraduate students who lead the [...]

[Read more →]

I am very pleased to report that Sybase has once again contributed funds to support the Women in Computer Science initiative at the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science at the University of Waterloo. The faculty and staff of WICS, chaired by Associate Professor Nancy Day, encourage and support the study of Computer Science [...]

[Read more →]

In early November at the IBM Toronto CAS Conference I learned privately that Frank Tompa had been selected as an ACM Fellow for 2010. Recently ACM has publicly announced the recipients so I am pleased to congratulate Frank on his selection for For contributions to text-dominated and semi-structured data management. along with two other database-research [...]

[Read more →]

Yesterday I listened to Kelly Lyons of the University of Toronto present the first Sybase-sponsored Database Seminar Series talk at the University of Waterloo. Kelly’s interesting talk was entitled “Mediating human-to-human interactions through technology” and she presented an overview of her research program and the contributions made by her graduate students. Below are my edited [...]

[Read more →]

Monday’s DBTEST 2010 Workshop at the 2010 ACM SIGMODconference in Indianapolis concluded with an interesting panel discussion that included keynote speaker Phyllis Frankl (Polytechnic Institute of NYU), Leo Giakoumakis (Microsoft), Harumi Kuno (Hewlett-Packard Laboratories), Ken Salem (University of Waterloo) and Florian Waas (Greenplum). Each panelist discussed what they thought the “Grand Challenges” of database and [...]

[Read more →]

This past Thursday I had the opportunity to listen to Peter F. Sweeney of the IBM T. J. Watson Research Laboratory as he spoke on “The Poor State of Experimental Evaluation of Software and Systems in Computer Science” during a lecture at the University of Waterloo. Here’s Peter’s abstract: As hardware and software continues to [...]

[Read more →]

Around the office, my recent articles regarding the forthcoming ACM-W event at Queen’s University, and the sponsorship of the University of Waterloo’s Women in Computer Science organization by Sybase Waterloo, has sparked several comments – mostly from those who, having graduated from university some years ago, had not realized that the situation had become so [...]

[Read more →]

From inception, Sybase Canada has employed undergraduate co-op interns throughout the company: interns are employed in product marketing, human resources, technical support, consulting, product management, and engineering. In early 2009 Sybase iAnywhere Engineering expanded this program to establish an internship program for qualified graduate students in Computer Science and Engineering. Spearheaded by my colleague Anil [...]

[Read more →]

On Friday I attended a Distributed Systems seminar at the University of Waterloo given by Christopher Ming-Yee Iu, now a PhD student at EPFL in Lausanne studying under Willy Zwaenepoel. Here’s Ming’s abstract: Instead of using a separate query language like SQL to query databases, many programmers prefer using higher-level abstraction layers like Ruby on [...]

[Read more →]