Christian S. Jensen named ACM Fellow

His research focuses on the management of data that are temporal, spatial, and spatiotemporal. The availability of increasing volumes of such data is brought about by several trends, including the following: increasingly ubiquitous wireless communications; the growing deployment of sensors, including location sensors such as GPS and Galileo; increased data storage capacities and communication bandwidths; and general improvement in the performance/price ratio. Within this area, his research covers conceptual and logical data modeling; data models and query languages; query processing and optimization frameworks; transaction support; and indexing and query processing.

Christian S. Jensen is among the most productive and highest cited computer scientists in Denmark. His current Google-Scholar-based h-index is 50 and he is ranked highly among computer scientists in Denmark at Microsofts Libra Academic Search, which ranks computer science researchers according to total numbers of citations.

The ACM Fellow Program : "The ACM Fellows Program was established by Council in 1993 to recognize and honor outstanding ACM members for their achievements in computer science and information technology and for their significant contributions to the mission of the ACM. The ACM Fellows serve as distinguished colleagues to whom the ACM and its members look for guidance and leadership as the world of information technology evolves."

The ACM Press Announcement: http://www.acm.org/press-room/news-releases/2011/fellows-2011

Associate and assistant professor positions available at Daisy

In the Department of Computer Science at Aalborg University, Denmark, a number of assistant professor positions and one or more associate professor positions are available. Applicants are sought within all the department's research areas.

As members of Center for Data-Intensive Systems, Daisy, the database research faculty primarily conduct research in the areas temporal and spatio-temporal databases, mobile services, data warehousing, and business intelligence. According to a recent international evaluation, the research performance places Daisy among the world leaders in its core areas.

Additional information:
Associate professor: http://kortlink.dk/a5qm
Firm deadline: February 1, 2012

Assistant professor: http://kortlink.dk/a5qk
Firm deadline: March 1, 2012

Please read the announcements carefully and follow the instructions there. Note that applications by email are NOT considered.

The department offers office and computing facilities, secretarial support, and substantial support for travel. The teaching load is relatively low: typically at most 30 lectures per year, in addition to project supervision. The area features relatively low cost of living, clean air, beautiful forests and beaches, and very good transportation infrastructure.

The department: http://www.cs.aau.dk

Daisy: http://daisy.aau.dk

For further information, contact: Torben Bach Pedersen (tbp "-at-"cs.aau.dk)

7. december fra kl. 14.00 til 16.30 afholder Daisy Innovation en workshop om kvaliteten af databaseskemaer.

Under workshoppen præsenterer forskere fra Daisy Innovation et nyt automatisk analyseværktøj, DBLint, som vha. anerkendte designmønstre hurtigt og nemt kan teste, om selv det mest omfattende databaseskema overholder alle design guidelines. Udover præsentation af DBLint vil der være mulighed for afprøvning af systemet og en fælles diskussion om database design guidelines.

Mødet afholdes på Institut for Datalogi, Selma Lagerløfs Vej 300, lokale 0.2.13. Yderligere information, program og tilmelding, klik her

Time: Wednesday, November 23, 3:00PM
Place: Room 0.2.13

Abstract:
Geo-social Networks (GeoSN) are characterized by the association of a spatio-temporal context to events, resources, and participants in a social network. They are rapidly attracting millions of mobile device users finding new useful location based services and a new way of socializing. This talk will briefly discuss new types of privacy threats generated from users implicitly or explicitly sharing the whereabouts of other users. Future challenges will be highlighted by the presentation of preliminary solutions for two different problems: privacy-aware posting of geo-tagged resources, and private proximity sharing.

Link to information about the speaker.

Daisy partner in e-Health Tech Center

Aalborg University, Technical University of Denmark, and many other partners such as hospitals, municipalities and companies, now join forces In the new e-Health Tech Center focusing on healthcare and welfare technologies. The aim of the center is to develop new technologies that can Provide better care and treatment for an ageing population while keeping costs down. Daisy is one of the many strong research groups involved in the center.

More information can be found here.

Panel debate on Analytics over Big Multidimensional Data

Daisy Professor Torben Bach Pedersen participated in a panel debate at the ACM 14th International Workshop On Data Warehousing and OLAP (DOLAP 2011) The panel theme was "Analytics over Large-Scale Multidimensional Data: The Big Data Revolution!" The other panelists were Curtis Dyreson, Utah State University, Carlos Ordonez, University of Houston, and Oscar Romero, Politechnico de Catalunya. The panel was directed by Alfredo Cuzzocrea, ICAR-CNR & University of Calabria. At the panel, a number of emerging research issues were discussed, including data source heterogeneity, filtering out uncorrelated data, unstructured data, scalability, NoSQL data stores, and visualization.

Invited talk on MIRABEL at Smart Grid Applied conference

The MIRABEL project was selected by Invest In Denmark for presentation at the Smart Grid Applied conference held in Copenhagen on October 24-26, 2011, see http://www.smartgridapplied.com/. The conference serves as a showcase of prime Danish research and industrial products within the booming smart grid area, and is aimed at foreign, especially US, companies looking for partners. The presentation was very well received and generated a lot of interest from the participants.

New movie explains passenger benefits of BagTrack project

Recently, Daisy, Lyngsoe Systems, Aalborg Airport, IATA, and SAS, were awarded a grant from the Danish Advanced Technology Foundation for the BagTrack project. The project has just started, and among the first results are a new movie explaining the benefits of the BagQuality Network which is the Lyngsoe Systems product resulting from BagTrack. The movie can be seen here.

Daisy ranked among top European database groups in publication survey.

A recent publication survey in SIGMOD Record analyzes publications in the two top conferences (SIGMOD and VLDB) and the two top journals (ACM TODS and VLDB Journal) within the database area, over the 10 year period 2000-2009. Amongst other things, the survey analyzes the number of papers in these top outlets for different institutions. The list is dominated by top US and Asian universities and industrial labs with very large group sizes. Looking specifically at European institutions, Aalborg University (Daisy) comes in at 2nd place with 26 papers, closely following ETH Zürich with 29 papers. This confirms the findings of the recent research evaluation at the Department of Computer Science which also placed Daisy at the European top. The publication survey can be found here: http://www.sigmod.org/publications/sigmod-record/1103/pdfs/06.forum.aumuller.pdf

Over the last two months, Daisy has graduated no less than six new Ph.D.'s:

• June 20: Dingmin Wu, advisor Christian S. Jensen, topic Spatial Keyword Query Processing
• June 20: Kostas Tzoumas, advisor Christian S. Jensen, topic Techniques for the Efficient Management of Non-Uniform Data and Workloads
• August 8: Rene Hansen, advisor Bent Thomsen, topic "Towards Ubiquitous Positioning"
• August 12: Morten Goodwin, advisor Christian S. Jensen, topic Towards Automated eGovernment Monitoring
• August 24: Carmen Ruiz Vicente, advisor Christian S. Jensen, topic Enabling Location-Related Privacy in Geo-Social Mobile Internet Services
• August 26: Nadeem Iftikhar, advisor Torben Bach Pedersen, topic Flexible and Effective Aggregation and Exchange of Farming-related Data.

A number of fully funded PhD positions are available at Daisy, Department of Computer Science, Aalborg University. The positions are available from October 1, 2011, or as soon as possible thereafter.

Qualifications needed: An M.Sc. in Computer Science or a closely related field from a recognized institution, with excellent results. Good communication skills in English, oral as well as written, are essential. Further information about the position and the application procedure can be found at http://tinyurl.com/3vfkwxo

The application deadline is September 1, 2011. Please note that applications via email will NOT be considered.

Daisy researchers to solve baggage problems

A consortium including Lyngsoe Systems, SAS, IATA, Aalborg Airport, Department of Mathematical Sciences, AAU, and Daisy have received a grant of 15 million DKK for the project "BagTrack: Styr på bagagen." The project aims to build a breakthrough worldwide IT solution for baggage tracking and management that will eventually cut the worldwide baggage problems by 50%. Daisy researchers will develop technologies for capturing and analyzing the massive amounts of RFID-based baggage location information in real-time. The Daisy research effort will be led by Associate Professor Hua Lu and Professor Torben Bach Pedersen.

More information (In Danish) is found here and here.

Press coverage: Danish National Radio News, JP, and News story from Politiken.

Time: Wednesday June 1, 13-14
Place: Room 0.2.11

Talk by Verena Kantere

Abstract:
The term 'cloud computing' is nowadays synonymous to computing services offered by large-scale infrastructures. The key to the success of cloud computing is to provide seamless and efficient management of large dynamic disseminated data collections, such as scientific data, in order to maximize their availability while minimizing capital expenditure. This talk leverages lessons learned from financial management to solve the problem of both cost- and time-efficient management on clouds offering online data services. We propose a novel economy model for a cloud where users pay on-the-go for the data services they receive and user payments can be used for service provision, infrastructure maintenance and profit. The economy employs a cost model that takes into account all the available resources in a cloud, such as disk space and I/O operations, CPU time and network bandwidth. In order to ensure the economic viability of the cloud, the cost of offering new services has to be amortized to prospective users that will use them. We propose a novel cost amortization model that predicts the extent of amortization in time and number of users. The economy is completed with a dynamic pricing scheme that achieves optimal cloud profit while ensuring user satisfaction with service prices. The talk concludes with future research directions on the provision of online data services.

Bio:
Verena Kantere is a tenure-track lecturer at the Department of Electrical Engineering and Information Technology at the Cyprus University of Technology. She has received a Diploma (2000) and a Ph.D. (2007) from the National Techincal University of Athens, (NTUA) and a M.Sc. degree from the Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto (2003). During her graduate studies her research interests focused on problems of data exchange and coordination in Peer-to-Peer (P2P) overlays with structured and unstructured data, as well as multidimensional data sharing. She has proposed frameworks and techniques that deal with the heterogeneity problem, query processing and rewriting, as well as managing continuous queries. Furthermore, she has shown interest and work in the field of Semantic Web, concerning the problem of semantic similarity, annotation, clustering and integration. After the completion of her PhD studies and until recently, she worked as a postdoctoral researcher (2008-2010) at the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL). Her research focuses on the provision of cloud data services, focusing on the special needs of large analytical data, such as scientific data. She is working towards the incorporation of cost in existing and new data management techniques and has designed a novel data-aware economy model for cloud data services.

Daisy receives top marks in international research evaluation.

The Department of Computer Science at Aalborg University has recently carried out a research evaluation for the period 2006-10 performed by a distinguished international evaluation panel. The research performed by Daisy was evaluated to be internationally leading and Daisy's publication record in the period was deemed exceptional. The committee concludes "The unit is among the top-5 database groups in Europe, on level with institutions like ETH, and with an analogous significant reputation at world level."

More information (In Danish) is found here. The full evaluation report can be found here. The part on Daisy is found on page 43-65.

Fredag den 13. maj fra kl. 13.00 til 15.00 afholder Daisy Innovation en workshop om kvaliteten af databaseskemaer.

Under workshoppen præsenterer forskere og studerende et nyt automatisk analyseværktøj, DBLint, som vha. anerkendte designmønstre hurtigt og nemt kan teste, om selv det mest omfattende databaseskema overholder alle design guidelines. Udover præsentation af DBLint vil der være mulighed for afprøvning af systemet og en fælles diskussion om database design guidelines.

Mødet afholdes på Institut for Datalogi, Selma Lagerløfs Vej 300, lokale 0.2.90.

Yderligere information, program og tilmelding, klik her.

Elite Masters education granted to Daisy

In recognition of the excellent research conducted at Daisy, the Faculty of Engineering and Science at Aalborg University has granted Daisy an elite Masters program in data-intensive systems, starting September 2011. The elite program is an extended version of the existing Masters programs in computer science and software engineering. The program is aimed at highly skilled students with high grades for the bachelor degree. The students will work with particularly challenging projects within the Daisy core topics of data management, mobile services, and programming technology, aiming at achieving results than can contribute directly to Daisy's research and be published in conferences and journals. In addition to the regular study activities, elite students will follow special courses and seminars, including selected Ph.D. courses.

For further information, contact the head of the Elite Program in Data-intensive Systems, Professor Torben Bach Pedersen, tbp@cs.aau.dk

VKR Annual Award 2011 goes to Christian S. Jensen.

The Villum Kann Rasmussen Annual Award for Technical and Scientific Research 2011 (Villum Kann Rasmussens Årslegat til Teknisk og Naturvidenskabelig Forskning 2011) has been awarded to Daisy Director, Professor Christian S. Jensen. The award is given for excellent and groundbreaking research within database management and data-intensive systems, especially management of temporal and spatio-temporal data. With 2,500,000 DKK, the award is the largest Danish research award in terms of amount, and one of the most significant within technical and scientific research.

Further information (in Danish) is found here http://cs.au.dk/uploads/media/Pressemeddelelse_CSJ_2011.pdf.

The long-running collaboration between Daisy and Danish BI vendor TARGIT has yielded significant results both commercially and academically. On December 6, 2010, TARGIT CTO Morten Middelfart successfully defended his Ph.D. thesis at Daisy. The work described in the thesis has resulted in a number of papers as well as in significant new functionality in TARGIT’s product line.

See more (In Danish)

Forskere fra Institut for Datalogi samarbejder med virksomheden BeKTra omkring trafikoptimering af den behovsstyrede trafik. Behovsstyret trafik dækker over den trafik, der hver dag finder sted i kommunalt regi, når de af kommunens borgere, der har behov, skal transporteres til og fra læge, sygehuse, speciallæge ligesom det også dækker over handicapkørsel.

I samarbejde med forskere, der har stor viden omkring trafikoptimering, har BeKTra fået hjælp til at udvikle it-systemer, der planlægger og koordinerer kørslen, ligesom virksomheden har fået mulighed for at optimere håndteringen af de mange data om køretider -og ruter. Det betyder, at den behovsstyrede trafik optimeres og udnyttes bedst muligt, og medfører igen færre forsinkelser, bedre ressourceudnyttelse og store besparelser.

Samarbejdet finder sted i regi af DAISY Innovation, der er et internationalt orienteret forskningscenter på Institut for Datalogi. Centret har fokus på forskning, uddannelse og innovation inden for data-intensive systemer, og centrets vision er at være et internationalt ledende og anerkendt forskningscenter, der er på forkant med centrale temaer.

Se hele historien her

Lyngsoe Systems er blevet partner i Daisy Innovation. Daisy Innovation (DaIn) projektet vil gøre Daisy's spidskompetencer indenfor dataintensive systemer tilgængelige for virksomheder i Region Nordjylland. Dette gøres ved hjælp af en række aktiviteter:

• samarbejdsprojekter om konkrete, afgrænsede problemstillinger
• netværk til vidensformidling og -udveksling
• rådgivning omkring mindre problemstillinger
• udbud af skræddersyede uddannelsesforløb

Torsdag den 9. december mødes alle virksomhedskontakter og samarbejdspartnere til en uformel julekommensammen på Cassiopeia fra kl. 14.00-16.00.

• Kom og oplev vores mange IKT-opstillinger

• Tag det første spadestik til nye samarbejdsprojekter

• Smag de kendte Cassiopeia-vafler og deltag i konkurrencen om en smartphone

Deltagelse er gratis men tilmelding via dette link er nødvendig.

Download invitation her. 

Hua Lu received the BSc and MSc degrees from Peking University, China, in 1998 and 2001, respectively, and the PhD degree in computer science from the National University of Singapore in 2007. He joined Aalborg University and Daisy as an assistant professor in February 2007. He has been appointed Associate Professor of the Department of Computer Science, Aalborg University since October 2010. His research interests include databases, geographic information systems, as well as mobile computing. His current research activities concern indoor spatial awareness, complex queries on spatial data with heterogeneous attributes, and location privacy in mobile services. He is a member of the IEEE.

The book "Multidimensional Databases and Data Warehousing" by Christian S. Jensen, Torben Bach Pedersen, and Christian Thomsen has been published by Morgan & Claypool.

The Center of Data Intensive Systems (Daisy) at Aalborg University is a leading European research center in database technologies. Daisy is looking for an experienced developer to build a prototype of a promising indexing technology. The position is based in Aalborg Denmark, is fulltime, and has to be filled from the 1st of October till the 31st of January. You will be part of a small team working on developing an in-house technology and bringing it to industry. You will be responsible of the implementation of a specification within different DBMS. You will be working in an exciting environment, in close relationship with database researchers. The initial employment is with Aalborg University for the proof-of-concept period (until February 2011). It is expected that a spin-out company will be established during 2010, and that the employment can be transferred to the spin-out company at the end of the proof-of-concept period. Therefore, candidates with an entrepreneurial mind are strongly encouraged to apply.

Responsibilities:

• Development of a portable module for the technology
• Integration of the module in different database systems
• Benchmark of the technology

Requirements:

• University degree in Computer Science or a related technical field
• Strong programming skills in C / C++
• Experience developing modules for DBMS (Oracle, DB2, Microsoft SQL Server, Postgres, …)
• Experience setting up database benchmarks (TPC, DBT)
• Good knowledge of Unix / Linux environments
• Enthusiasm for working in a startup
• Pro-active, keen on taking initiatives
• Fluent in English

Benefits:

• Competitive salary, plus pensions contributions
• Play an important role in PLWAH, make a real difference, be part of the next big thing
• With more than 20 members, Daisy provides a very active work environment that is well integrated into the global database research community
• Aalborg is the center of a beautiful region of Denmark, with nice beaches, unique nature, and clean air

Please send your CV and application letter to fdeliege@cs.aau.dk.

The Center of Data Intensive Systems (Daisy) at Aalborg University is a leading European research center in database technologies. Daisy is looking for an experienced business developer to bring a promising indexing technology to market. The position is based in Aalborg Denmark, is part-time, and has to be filled from the 1st of October till the 31st of January. You will be part of a small team working on developing the technology. You will be responsible of finding early adopters, creating relationship with potential clients, and developing a clear business strategy. You will be working in an exciting environment, in close relationship with database researchers. The initial employment is with Aalborg University for the proof-of-concept period (until February 2011). It is expected that a spin-out company will be established during 2010, and that the employment can be transferred to the spin-out company at the end of the proof-of-concept period. Therefore, candidates with an entrepreneurial mind are strongly encouraged to apply.

Responsibilities:

• Prospect partners
• Contact potential clients
• Establish a product to market strategy
• Attract investors

Requirements:

• University degree in Business or related field
• 5+ years of experience in Sales
• Proven track of records of sales in the database domain
• Understanding of the database vendors market
• Excellent oral and verbal communication skills in English
• Top interpersonal skills
• Enthusiasm for working in a startup, strong entrepreneurial drive

Benefits:

• Competitive salary, plus pensions contributions
• Play an important role in PLWAH, make a real difference, be part of the next big thing
• Aalborg is the center of a beautiful region of Denmark, with nice beaches, unique nature, and clean air

Please send your CV and application letter to fdeliege@cs.aau.dk.