Very Large Data Base 10 Year Best Paper Award for Prof. Gustavo Alonso
Prof. Gustavo Alonso has recently received the VLDB 10 Year Best Paper Award. This award has been established for the author(s) whose paper appeared in the VLDB conference 10 years ago and has had the most impact on database research since then. In the interview, Prof. Alonso talks on the significance of this award and the impact of his remarkable research achievements on society, as well as business and industry.
Gustavo, 10 years have passed by. Following Gerhard Weikum in 2002 and Hans-Jörg Schek in 2008, you are the third professor our Department who has been awarded with this internationally recognized prize. How would you describe the key of yours and the Department's success?
This is a very special award that looks back ten years and recognizes work that has had long term impact in research and industry. A common aspect to all the work that receives such an award is the combination of a deep theoretical insight with the implementation of a system that demonstrates the feasibility and potential of the theoretical insight.
Gerhard Weikum and his team were precursors of the idea of self-tuning and developed the algorithms for automatic disk management in databases. The group of Hans-Jörg Schek established the theoretical foundations behind algorithms for multidimensional search spaces and proposed the first practical solution to the problem. Bettina Kemme and I looked at the problem of efficient data replication and showed that there was no need to trade consistency and performance as people were doing at the time, implementing the first relational database that provided scalable data replication.
To my knowledge, there is no other department of computer science that can boast three such awards. In my mind, that work done at D-INFK has been repeatedly recognized in this way is a tribute to the model followed at ETH and at D-INFK. The availability of resources that are not dependent on external funding and current research fashions allows us to pursue projects that are ahead of their time and whose results are quite uncertain. For systems groups like the ones behind all these awards, it is also very important to have a critical mass of people and resources to be able to embark into development efforts that take time but that – at the end – are a very important part of the contribution as the implemented systems are what convinces industry and research peers that far-off ideas are workable in practice.
Can you please explain to the non-scientists among us what the significant impact of your profound research on society is? What has changed for the "every day" man and woman?
At the core of the Information Society lies the ability to deal with enormous amounts of data that technology makes accessible from anywhere and at any time. Today, "digitally born data" – data that is created in digital form – is far more common than data that is created on traditional media like paper. This raises huge challenges in managing the vast amounts of data that are becoming available, creating problems in terms of processing, long term maintenance, and consistency, in addition to the ones that are more often discussed in public such as privacy and security.
Our research of ten years ago was an important piece in allowing the processing of larger amounts of data without giving up consistency. This translates in better services and more accurate information in the digital world.
Where do you see the special opportunities for business and industry to grow for the next decade and beyond?
Well, we are currently experiencing a radical change in the IT industry and in computer science. Cloud computing is a departure from the existing business models in software and hardware, moving IT itself from the secondary sector of the economy to the tertiary (service) sector and beyond. This will have profound implications for how we perceive computers and software. Parts of these changes are already visible as millions of people worldwide connected through a cloud of social networks (recent reports are talking about 2 billion people connected to the Internet worldwide), many using mobile phones as the access point rather than computers. These developments accelerate the adoption of information technology and have brought about the beginning of a true information society. The opportunities that these changes bring are huge, with completely new markets and services becoming possible and reachable to a population of potential consumers of a size previously unknown in any industry. These are the technology and societal processes fuelling concepts such as Software as a Service, Cloud Computing, and companies like Google, Twitter, Flickr, Facebook, etc.
For researcher departments like ours, these are really interesting times with plenty of opportunities for pioneering long term research of value to both industry and society.
Gustavo, thank you very much. I feel quite proud that research done in the department ten years ago has become such a fundamental part of modern cloud computing systems and products.