COMAD 2009

The 15th International Conference on Management of Data – COMAD 2009 was organized by International School of Information Management between 9-12th of December 2009. COMAD - modeled along the lines of ACM SIGMOD, has been the premier international database conference hosted in India. The first COMAD was held in 1989, and it has been held on a nearly annual basis since then. COMAD has always had a significant international participation, with about 30% of the papers being from outside India, including Europe, USA and East/South-East Asia.

The 15th COMAD was organized at two venues.
• Infosys Technologies Ltd, Mysore &
• ISiM, University of Mysore, Mysore.

The conference showcased,
• 3 Keynotes,
• 18 Research paper presentations,
• 6 Industry paper presentations,
• 3 Tutorials,
• 4 Demonstrations and
• 2 co-located workshops.

The conference itself was held at Infosys Technologies Ltd. and the workshops were conducted within the premises of International School of Information management (ISiM).

The two workshops were held on 9th Dec 2009 at ISiM.

The Business Intelligence workshop focused on the various concepts of Business Intelligence. The key highlight being the practitioners’ perspective on BI and its applications and how it is changing the way we manage our data today. The workshop also delved into the BI framework, terminology and the business problems that BI helps to resolve. Microsoft BI Suite Toolkit will be used to demonstrate the basics of Data Transformation, Analysis and Design of Reports. The workshop was conducted by the BI team of Infosys Technologies Ltd.

The prime focus of the PhD Workshop was to provide a platform wherein students who have already registered/planning to register for PhD can present their ideas before experts and peers in the field and get feedback from them for their work. Contributions were invited from PhD students working in the broad area of data management. After rigorous peer review, four papers were accepted for presentation at the workshop. The workshop will also include two invited talks – ‘Mining the Web for Business Intelligence’ by Prof. Rohini K. Srihari (University at Buffalo, State University of New York) and ‘How to Survive a PhD’ by Prof. Sharma Chakravarthy (University of Texas at Arlington, USA)’.

The conference was held within the sprawling campus of Infosys Technologies Ltd at Mysore. The program schedule was spread over three days from 10th – 12th Dec 2009. The program started at 9AM and went on till 5.30 PM everyday.

However, the major attraction of the event had been the three keynotes.

Prof. Sunita Sarawagi presented the keynote address on 10th of December on the topic of – ‘Querying for Relations from the Semi-structured Web’. Her talk covered mainly the issue of a class of web queries whose result is a multi-column relation instead of a collection of unstructured documents as in standard web search. Furthermore, she demonstrated the means to compile the result from several, possibly overlapping, tables and lists on the web, particularly in the cases wherein the user specifies the query either via a few example records, or a text description of columns of the relation.

Prof. Amr El Abbadi presented the keynote on 11th of December on the topic of ‘Fraud, Anonymization and Privacy in the Internet: A Data-oriented Perspective’. During the talk, he touched the varying security aspects of data in different contexts that arise in today’s internet applications. He also spoke of the increasing popularity of social networks that has initiated a fertile research area in information extraction and data mining. He opined that it could be leveraged for better understanding of sociological, behavioral, and other interesting phenomena.

Dr. Anand Deshpande presented the keynote address on 12th of December on the topic of ‘Top 10 Technologies to Watch 2010’. He delved on the ideas of Cloud Computing, Analytics, Scientific Computing, UID project, India Scale Issues, Mobile Commerce, User Interfaces – query and results, Enterprise Search – structured and unstructured data, Email, social networking and Game boxes.

The conference also extended a welcome tea party and a banquet to the delegates. The event witnessed an approximate number of 175 participants. The number has been the highest compared to the last few occasions. Participants came from all parts of the country and abroad.

The pictures taken during the WORKSHOP, CONFERENCE, WELCOME PARTY and BANQUET are shared as web albums.