Time: August 26 - 27, 2010
Place: Aalborg University
Description:
In this course, we will review two main aspects of data management - persistent data storage and retrieval systems for application development (OLTP) and data-analysis platforms and solutions for data-centric decision making (OLAP). We will start with a broad overview of the key features of OLTP and OLAP systems to underscore the main principles that guided the overall design of these system in the enterprise context. We will then present the emerging computing infrastructures that have emerged as a compelling paradigm for scalable and reliable computing substrate for building large-scale applications as well as for large-scale data analysis. We will then explore the emerging approaches for building Internet scale persistent data stores (Google's BigTable, PNUTS from Yahoo!, and Amazon's Dynamo) as well as massively distributed and parallel frameworks (MapReduce and Hadoop) for large-scale data analysis. During this course we will identify with the key research and development challenges for managing internet scale data in cloud computing infrastructures built over geographically dispersed data centers. Instructor Biography:
Dr. Divyakant Agrawal is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of California at Santa Barbara. His research expertise is in the areas of database systems, distributed computing, data warehousing, and large-scale information systems. From January 2006 through December 2007, Dr. Agrawal served as VP of Data Solutions and Advertising Systems at the Internet Search Company ASK.com. While at ASK.com, Dr. Agrawal was the Chief Architect for building the next-generation Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing system at ASK.com. In addition, he developed revenue-sensitive products at ASK.com by applying data-mining and machine-learning technologies over ASK.com's historical data. Dr. Agrawal also serves as a Visiting Senior Research Scientist at the NEC Laboratories of America in Cupertino, CA. During his professional career he has served on the Program Committees of International Conferences, Symposia, and Workshops and served as an editor of the journal of Distributed and Parallel Databases from 1993 to 2008 and the VLDB Journal from 2003-2009. Dr. Agrawal currently serves on the editorial board of the Proceedings of the VLDB. He is serving as the Program Chair for 2010 ACM SIGMOD Conference on Management of Data (SIGMOD'2010), as the General Chairs of 2010 ACM SIGSPATIAL Conference on geographical Information Systems (GIS'2010), and 2010 IEEE Workshp on Information and Software as a Service (WISS'2009).

Wednesday the 25th October at 15.00, a new meeting is held in Daisy Innovation's Business Intelligence Technology (BIT) Network. This time Professor Divyakant Agrawal from University of California at Santa Barbara gives the talk "Data in the Cloud: New challenges or more of the same?".
Abstract:
Over the past two decades, database and systems researchers have made significant advances in the development of algorithms and techniques to provide data management solutions that carefully balance the three major requirements when dealing with critical data: high availability, scalability, and data consistency. However, over the past few years the data requirements, in terms of availability and scalability, from Internet scale enterprises that provide services and cater to millions of users has been unprecedented. Current proposed solutions to scalable data management, driven primarily by prevalent application requirements, significantly downplay the data consistency requirements and instead focus on very high availability and almost unlimited scalability to support data-rich applications for millions to tens of millions of users. In particular, the "newer" data management systems limit consistent access only at the granularity of single objects, rows, or keys, thereby significantly trading-off consistency in order to achieve very high scalability and availability. But the growing popularity of "cloud computing", the resulting shift of a large number of Internet applications to the cloud, and the quest towards providing data management services in the cloud, has opened up the challenge for designing data management systems that provide consistency guarantees at a granularity which goes beyond single rows and keys. In this talk, we analyze the design choices that allowed modern scalable data management systems to achieve orders of magnitude higher levels of scalability compared to traditional databases. With this understanding, we highlight some design principles for data management systems providing scalable and consistent data management as a service in the cloud. We conclude the talk by presenting results from two prototype systems which strike a middle-ground between the two radically different data management architectures: traditional database management systems where the data is treated as a "whole" versus modern key-value stores where data is treated as a collection of independent "granules".
Speaker Biography:
Dr. Divy Agrawal serves on the faculty of Computer Science at the University of California at Santa Barbara. His research interests are in the areas of distributed systems, databases, and large-scale information systems such as data warehouses, digital libraries, and other data/information rich environments.
The talk takes place in room 0.2.13.

Oplysninger om millioner af el-kunders adfærd skal være med til at flytte en større del af europæernes samlede strømforbrug over på vedvarende energikilder. Dataloger fra Aalborg Universitet skal sammen med internationale samarbejdspartnere holde styr på de enorme mængder data i et nyt stort EU-støttet projekt med navnet MIRACLE. Mere information her.

Daisy afholder et kursus i objekt-orienteret programmering for industrielle programmører.

Kurset henvender sig til erfarne imperative programmører der ønsker at blive "opgraderet" til at kunne programmere objekt-orienteret. Mere information om kurset her

Kurset afholdes i regi af projektet Daisy Innovation.

Deltagelse er gratis, men kun for partnere i projektet. Se mere om partnerskab her.

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

The database research faculty in Center for Data-Intensive Systems, Daisy, 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:

Assistant professor: http://stillinger.aau.dk/vis.php?nr=4969
Firm deadline: March 1, 2010

Please read the announcements carefully and follow the instructions there. Note that electronic applications are NOT accepted.

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) or Christian S. Jensen (csj "-at-" cs.aau.dk).

Daisy aims to fill two Ph.D. positions. Daisy offers excellent salaries for Ph.D. positions. Daisy is well integrated into the global research community.

Time: Monday 30th November, 14:30 - 16:30
Place: Aalborg University, Selma Lagerløfs vej 300, room 02.90

Abstract:
Community Question Answering (CQA) services are Internet services that enable users to ask and answer questions, as well as to search through historical question-answer pairs. Examples of such community-driven knowledge market services include Yahoo! Answers (answers.yahoo.com), WikiAnswers(wiki.answers.com), etc. This talk will cover the following essential tasks to build a community-based question-answer system.

1. Extracting Question answering knowledge from online forums, Wikipedia etc.
2. Finding expert users from the community for a new question such that they have knowledge about the question.
3. Finding relevant questions and thus answers for a query question.
4. Classifying questions into a hierarchy of taxonomies (categories)

This talk will introduce some data mining techniques (including sequential pattern mining, classification methods) and information retrieval techniques (popular retrieval models, such as vector space model, language model, and machine translation model) to solve the aforementioned tasks.

Click here to get more information about the seminar (in danish).

Time: Tuesday 17th November 2009, 14:00
Place: Aalborg University, Selma Lagerløfs vej 300, room 02.13

Abstract:
Rank-aware query processing has attracted much interest lately, as users are often overwhelmed by the size of query results. Therefore, ranked queries help users to identify a limited set of the most interesting or representative results, thereby enabling effective decision-making. In this talk, we will focus on two types of queries, namely skyline queries and reverse top-k queries.

Skyline queries have been proposed for discovering a set of interesting points. Unfortunately, as the dimensionality of the dataset grows, the skyline operator loses its discriminating power and returns a large fraction of the data. In this talk, I will present several interesting properties of the skyline points that lead to discovering the most important skyline points, and therefore to a ranking method of skyline points. On the other hand, top-k queries retrieve only the k objects that best match the user preferences, thus avoiding huge and overwhelming result sets. Top-k queries have been mainly studied from the perspective of the user. In this talk, I will present a novel query type, namely reverse top-k queries, that handles top-k queries from the perspective of the product manufacturer, by providing answers to questions like: "Given a potential product, which are the user preferences for which this product is in the top-k query result set"?

Short bio:
Akrivi Vlachou is currently a researcher in the database group of Prof.Kjetil Noervaag at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. She has been awarded an ERCIM “Alain Bensoussan” fellowship for post-doctoral studies in 2009. She received her PhD in 2008 entitled "Efficient Query Processing over Highly Distributed Data" from the Athens University of Economics and Business supervised by Prof.Michalis Vazirgiannis. She received her Master of science in "Advanced Information Systems" and her Diploma in “Computer Science and Telecommunications” from the Department of Computer Science, University of Athens in 2001 and 2003 respectively. Her research interests lie in query processing and data management in large-scale distributed systems.

Time: Tuesday 17th November 2009, 10:00
Place: Aalborg University, Selma Lagerløfs vej 300, room 02.13

Abstract:
Skyline and top-k queries have received considerable attention in database research lately. A challenging problem is to efficiently compute such queries in non-centralized domains, such as widely distributed systems or parallel architectures.
In this talk, I will present some solutions to this problem, exploiting as key observation that there exists an inherent relationship between skyline queries and top-k queries, as the skyline set contains all objects for any top-1 monotone function. In the first part of the talk, I will present the SPEERTO framework for top-k query processing in large-scale super-peer networks, under the assumption of horizontal data distribution over the peers. Relying on a thresholding scheme, SPEERTO returns the exact results progressively to the user, while the number of queried super-peers and transferred data is minimized. In the second part of the talk, I will focus on skyline computation in a parallel shared-nothing architecture. A novel data partitioning scheme will be presented for splitting data objects to servers, which greatly improves the performance of each server by dividing the workload fairly over the participating servers. By discussing the experimental results, the efficiency of the proposed partitioning scheme will be demonstrated.

Short bio:
Christos Doulkeridis is a post-doctoral researcher under an "Alain Bensoussan" fellowship in the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) in the group of professor Kjetil Noervaag. In 2007 he received his PhD entitled "Organizing and Searching Data in Unstructured P2P Networks" in the Department of Informatics, Athens University of Economics and Business (AUEB), under the supervision of associate professor Michalis Vazirgiannis. Prior to this, he received a Master of Science in Information Systems at the Athens University of Economics and Business (AUEB, 2003) and a Diploma from the department of Electrical Engineering at the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA, 2001). His research interests include data management in peer-to-peer systems, distributed knowledge discovery, mobile and context-aware computing, web services and semi-structured data.

Time: Monday 16th November, 14:30
Place: Aalborg University, Selma Lagerløfs vej 300, room 02.90

Abstract:
Recent advances in positioning and tracking technologies lead to the emergence of novel location-based services (LBS) that allow service providers and users to access spatio-temporal information. For example, an application could use location information to notify a user about traffic disruptions in his/her route, or when one of his/her friends is nearby. However, in some cases this information needs to be protected from unauthorized parties (e.g. a user may want to hide his/her position when located in a sensitive area such as a hospital). The protection of the privacy of the user and the confidentiality of this information is essential in these cases.

In this lecture we will present some approaches to preserve the privacy of the users in LBS, as well as discussing their applicability in actual services. First, we will describe some of the most popular LBSs, like georeferenced social networks, and how they deal with users' privacy concerns. Then, we will study the basic concepts in the privacy field, as well as existing research solutions. For a case study, we will focus on a privacy-aware friend-finder service. Finally, we will evaluate the requirements, conditions and new challenges to be addressed when deploying these solutions in a real-world scenario.

Click here to get more information about the seminar (in danish).

Time: Monday 2nd November 2009, 13:00
Place: Aalborg University, Selma Lagerløfs vej 300, room 02.12

In partial fulfillment of the terms for obtaining the Ph.D.-degree, Dalia Tiešyte will give a lecture on the following subject:
"GPS Data Management with Applications in Collective Transport"

Abstract:
A number of applications in areas such as logistics, postal services, cargo delivery, and collective transport involve the management of fleets of vehicles that are expected to travel along known routes according to either fixed or flexible schedules. With the spread of centralized, real-time position tracking of vehicles, transport-related systems are now able to provide up-to-date journey-related information to a variety of users, as well as store the position-related data for further analysis.

Due to road construction, accidents, and other unanticipated conditions, the vehicles' travel times deviate from the expected schedules. At the same time, there is a need for the infrastructure surrounding the vehicles to continually know the actual status of the vehicles. For example, anticipated arrival times of buses may have to be displayed at bus stops. It is a fundamental challenge to maintain this type of knowledge with minimal cost, and to provide the real-time information to the interested parties, such as managers of the systems, and the clients or passengers.

Extensive empirical evaluation of the proposed, as well as existing, methods is performed using both generated and real data. The real data was collected from public buses in Denmark using the GPS system. The thesis includes extensive empirical analyses of this bus trajectory data and evaluations of various prediction algorithms using this data. We show, that the prediction problem is highly data-dependent. Differently from the existing prediction methods, we aim to generalize the problem, and to allow adaptation to the data and context.

Members of the assessment committee are Associate Professor Vladimir I. Zadorozhny, University of Pittsburgh, USA, Associate Professor Yannis Theodoridis, University of Piraeus, Greece, and Associate Professor Simonas Šaltenis (Chairman). Professor Christian S. Jensen is Dalia Tiešyte's advisor.

All interested parties are welcome. After the defense the department will be hosting a small reception in cluster 3

Time: Friday 25th September 2009, 13:00
Place: Aalborg University, Selma Lagerløfs vej 300, room 02.13

In partial fulfillment of the terms for obtaining the Ph.D.-degree, Francois Deliège will give a lecture on the following subject:
"Concepts and Techniques for Flexible and Effective Music Data Management"

Abstract:
The growth of digital music has yielded a high demand for applications able to organize and search in large music databases. This thesis focuses on the data management aspects that underlie modern music applications: it introduces new conceptual representations for music similarities and playlists; and it proposes effective techniques facilitating the collection, storage, search, and manipulation of music data. The thesis resulted in 7 scientific papers and in a provisional patent.

The thesis begins by presenting the concept of Music Warehouses, dedicated Data Warehouses optimized for the storage and manipulation of music content. The thesis presents four main contributions. First, a scalable framework for collecting music features and distributing the computation of music similarities without infringing copyrights is presented.

Fourth, the thesis defines Fuzzy Lists, a novel mathematical concept, which provides a powerful foundation for playlist manipulation.

In conclusion, this thesis covers major issues linked to the management of music similarities and playlists and offers effective and flexible solutions that improve upon existing state-of-the-art techniques. Although the thesis focuses on the music domain, the presented techniques are general and can be applied to other domains; this substantially leverages the impact of the reported results.

Members of the assessment committee are Professor Yannis Manolopoulos, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece, Professor Robert Wrembel, Pozna. University of Technology, Poland, Associate Professor Kristian Torp (Chairman), Aalborg University, Denmark. Professor Torben B. Pedersen is Francois Deliège' advisor.

All interested parties are welcome. After the defense the department will be hosting a small reception in cluster 3

Fredag d. 18. september fra 12.45 til ca. 15.30 afholdes et fælles seminar for Agile and Open Business Intelligence (AOBI) projektet og BIT-netværket.

Til seminaret har vi været så heldige at få fat på to meget spændende internationale oplægsholdere, som vil fokusere på hhv. open source BI og agil BI.

• Gabrielle Ruffatti, Italien, vil præsentere OW2 BI Initiative, som er en uafhængig non-profit organisation, der arbejder med udvikling og udbredelse af open source BI-værktøjer.
• Daniel Fagerstrøm, Sverige, vil præsentere sine erfaringer med at styre agile BI-projekter og håndtere de udfordringer, der opstår

Se programmet på http://www.cs.aau.dk/~tbp/BIT/moede31/moede31.html.

This summer, from 8th to 10th July, Daisy is hosting in Aalborg the renowned international symposium on spatial and temporal databases (SSTD). SSTD 2009 is the eleventh of a series of biannual events that discuss new and exciting research in spatio-temporal data management and related technologies. Previous symposia were held in Santa Barbara (1989), Zurich (1991), Singapore (1993), Portland (1995), Berlin (1997), Hong Kong (1999), Los Angeles (2001), Santorini, Greece (2003), Angra dos Reis, Brazil (2005), and Boston (2007).

The primary focus of SSTD is on original results in the areas of theoretical foundations, design, implementation, and applications of spatial and temporal database technology. SSTD also welcomes experience reports from application specialists and the commercial community that describe lessons learned in the development, operation, and maintenance of actual systems in practical and innovative applications. The goal is to exchange research ideas and results which will initially contribute to the academic arena, but may also benefit the commercial community in the near future and encourage a dialog between practitioners and researchers.

SSTD 2009 presents a strong technical program that consists of 3 keynote speeches, 20 full research papers, 10 system demonstrations, and 7 posters. In addition, SSTD 2009 features 3 advanced research seminars that give tutorials on state-of-the-art topics within spatio-temporal data management. Check out SSTD 2009 website for more details.

Time: July 6-7, 2009
Place: Aalborg University, Selma Lagerløfs vej 300

Description:
The course will treat state-of-the-art topics within spatio-temporal data. Lecturers are drawn from the participants of the co-located 11th International Symposium on Spatial and Temporal Databases (SSTD) (held in Aalborg July 8-10, 2009).

1. Searching in Spatial, Temporal, Spatio-Temporal and Multimedia Databases
   Authors: Hans-Peter Kriegel, Peer Kröger, and Matthias Renz (University of Munich)
   Presented by: Peer Kröger and Matthias Renz (University of Munich)
   This seminar provides a comprehensive and comparative overview of general techniques to efficiently support similarity queries in spatial, temporal, spatio-temporal, and multimedia databases.
   
   
2. Nearest Neighbor Search in Spatial and Spatio-temporal Databases
   Dimitris Papadias (Hong Kong University of Science and Technology)
   This seminar covers algorithms, queries, continuous monitoring, and generalized nearest neighbor search queries in spatial and spatiotemporal databases.
   
   
3. Spatial/Spatio-temporal Data Mining
   Shashi Shekhar (University of Minnesota)
   This seminar surveys some of the new methods for spatial/spatio-temporal data mining including those for discovering spatial co-locations, detecting spatial outliers and location prediction.

Go to the Ph.D. course website.
Go to the SSTD program.

Time: May 11-12, 2009
Place: Aalborg University, Selma Lagerløfs vej 300, room 0.2.13

Description:
In the past decade, four (often correlated) factors have shifted the performance bottleneck of data-intensive commercial workloads from I/O to the processor and memory subsystem. First, storage systems are becoming faster and more intelligent (now disks come complete with their own processors and caches). Second, modern database storage managers aggressively improve locality through clustering, hide I/O latencies using prefetching, and parallelize disk accesses using data striping. Third, main memories have become much larger and often hold the application's working set. Fourth, the increasing memory/processor speed gap accentuates the importance of processor caches to database performance. Additionally to deep memory hierarchies, however, the new multi-core chips add aggressive parallelism as a first-class requirement for database system scalability and performance.

How is database technology coping with these changes? This course will first motivate the problem of database performance on modern hardware by discussing how database and computer microarchitecture technologies have evolved over the past three decades. We will discuss approaches and methodologies used to produce time breakdowns when executing database workloads on modern processors. Then, we will survey techniques proposed in the literature towards architecture-conscious database systems, and their evaluation. We will emphasize the importance and explain the challenges when determining the optimal data placement on all levels of memory hierarchy, and contrast to other approaches such as prefetching data and instructions. Finally, we will discuss open problems and future directions on that arise on the new multi-core chip platforms.

Anastasia Ailamaki is a professor at EPFL, Lausanne (Switzerland). She is an expert in database system behavior on modern hardware (processor, memory, and disks).

The Daisy-TARGIT collaboration project "Optimizing Business Intelligence With Sentinels" has developed a new technology, called Sentinels. Sentinels provide early warnings about potential changes in critical business measures, like revenue. This is based on discovering how changes in measures of activity close to the customers/users, e.g., number of customer complaints or number of negative blog entries, have previously resulted in changes in the critical business measures. The Sentinels technology has just shipped in TARGIT BI Suite 2K9 that was released on April 21, 2009. Feedback from the Danish launch events for TARGIT BI Suite 2K9 shows that many TARGIT partners found Sentinels to be the most valuable new feature.

Daisy members Christian Thomsen and Torben Bach Pedersen have in the ongoing Agile and Open Business Intelligence (AOBI) project investigated the possibilities for using open source business intelligence software, together with the companies TARGIT, Nykredit, and StoltzeIT. As a direct result of the project, the new TARGIT BI Suite 2K9, released on April 21, 2009, supports the open source OLAP server Mondrian and the open source DBMS MySQL.

Companies and organizations can thus avoid buying expensive commercial database management systems (DBMSs) and OLAP servers and instead use free and open products together with a TARGIT solution.

For more information on TARGIT BI Suite 2K9, see here http://www.targit.com/About_TARGIT/News...

Ira Assent received an award from Gesellschaft für Informatik for her Ph.D. thesis, which was defended at RWTH Aachen this past year. Prof. Dr. Thomas Seidl served as the thesis advisor.

The award was given to Ira on March 6 at a ceremony during the BTW 2009 conference.

Link to press release (in Danish)

Media coverage:
ComputerWorld.dk
Version2.dk
Industriens Dagblad
epn.dk
TV2 Nyhederne online
Nordjyske

Daisy Professor Torben Bach Pedersen have participated in what is believed to be the world's first talkshow about business intelligence. The talkshow was shot at TARGIT Decision Day, the annual user gathering of Danish BI vendor TARGIT. Torben Bach Pedersen participated in a panel debate discussing the current status and the future of business intelligence. The other panel parcipants were Managing Director Jørgen Bardenfleth, Microsoft Denmark, CTO Morten Middelfart, TARGIT, and Director Benny Lohse, Rehfeld Partners.

The panel debate can be seen at YouTube:
Debate part 1 of 3
Debate part 2 of 3
Debate part 3 of 3

The full debate is only available in Danish, but some parts of the talkshow are available with English subtitles (see the other videos at http://www.youtube.com/user/TargitAS).
Danish viewers will recognize former news anchor Søren Kaster as the moderator of the debate.

Professor Torben Bach Pedersen and Professor Christian S. Jensen have received a grant of 4.9 mio. DKK for the project "Daisy Innovation". The project will spread Daisy's core knowledge on data-intensive systems to local companies, through a number of collaboration projects, networks, courses, and consulting tasks.
Specific topics include intelligent transport systems, business intelligence, workflow, and software architecture and testing.

Link to press release (in Danish)

Time: Thursday 22th January, 14:30
Place: Aalborg University, Selma Lagerloefs vej 300, room 0.2.12

Ira Assent will give an overview over her past and current research in multimedia databases.

Abstract:
Many database applications require efficient access to relevant content. Similarity search, for example, retrieves the most relevant database objects for a given query. When databases are large and the features describing the objects are high dimensional, simple one-to-one comparison between the query and all objects in the database is clearly infeasible. Knowledge discovery in databases is similarly slowed down by high dimensional large databases. Knowledge discovery tasks such as classification or clustering require efficient algorithms for large scale applications. Our approaches for runtime improvement include multistep filter-and-refine algorithms and index structures. We provide guarantees on the correctness of the result and demonstrate efficiency in experimental evaluations.

In partial fulfillment of the terms for obtaining the Ph.D.-degree, Maria Magdalena Ruxanda will give a lecture on the following subject: "Towards Efficient Music Similarity Search, Ranking, and Recommendation" on Monday 5th of January 2009, 14.00 in room 02.13, SL 300

Abstract:
This lecture addresses the issues of efficient music search, retrieval and recommendation in the setup of large collections of digital music. Music collections available over the World Wide Web or stored in personal collections on Mp3 players, PCs, and media centers have grown drastically. This explosion of digital music available on large-scale emerged into new ways of distributing, consuming, and searching for music. Music information retrieval and recommendation systems that retrieve music similar to other music, have consequently become more and more popular. These developments call for efficient data management and information retrieval techniques for large music collections.

Members of the assessment committee are Associate Professor Andreas Rauber, Vienna University of Technology, Austria, Associate Professor Mario Nascimento, University of Alberta, Canada, and Associate Professor Kristian Torp, Chairman, Aalborg University, Denmark.

Click here to read the complete abstract of the lecture.

An article in IEEE Computer by members of Daisy's Streamspin team argues for the case of user-generated mobile services and explains the approach adopted by Streamspin. The Streamspin project is funded by CSDR.

The In Motion magazine of the Mobile Systems network puts focus on Streamspin. The article, in Danish, can be found on pages 8-9 in the magazine, which is available here: In Motion 2008.

Time: Wednesday 8th October, 13:00
Place: Aalborg University, Selma Lagerløfs vej 300, room 0.2.12

Abstract:
This talk deals with an unstudied area in moving objects database domains; predicting (long-term) future locations of moving objects. Moving object prediction enables us to provide a wide range of applications, such as traffic prediction, pre-detection of an aircraft collision, and reporting attractive gas prices for drivers along their routes ahead. Nevertheless, existing location prediction techniques are limited to support such applications since they are generally capable only of short-term predictions.

In real-world, many objects exhibit typical movement patterns. This pattern information is able to serve as an important background to tackle the limitations of the existing prediction methods. We aim at offering foundations of pattern-aware prediction for moving objects, rendering more precise prediction results.

Specifically, this talk focuses on three parts. The first part of the talk studies the problem of predicting future locations of moving objects in Euclidean space. The second part covers the prediction problem for moving objects in network space. The third part of the talk extends the prediction problem for a single object to that for multiple objects.

Hoyoung Jeung has a post-doc position in EFPL, Lausanne (Switzerland) and will be visiting AAU for 2 months.

Time: Wednesday 27th August, 13-14
Place: Aalborg University, Selma Lagerløfs vej 300, room 0.2.90

Abstract:
Software documentation has many different forms. Source code documentation targets software developers or maintainers. Documenting source code comprises documenting interfaces, object collaborations and the ideas and rationales behind them. On the other hand there is user documentation, which addresses the persons who will actually work with the software. All kinds of documentation have in common that they tend to age, i.e. the source code and therefore the software product evolve faster than the corresponding documentation. Automating the tedious and error-prone parts of updating documentation would alleviate the problem. The talk will give an overview of ideas and solutions for keeping the different kinds of documentation consistent. Additionally, new documentation problems introduced by model driven software development (MDSD) will be illustrated along with first ideas how to solve them.

Andreas Bartho is a PhD student at the Technical University in Dresden, Germany.

Time: Wednesday 27th August, 11-12
Place: Aalborg University, Selma Lagerløfs vej 300, room 0.2.13 (to be confirmed)

Abstract:
Observation and analysis of a phenomenon at unprecedented levels of granularity not only furthers our understanding of it, but also transforms the way it is studied. For instance, invention of gene-sequencing and computational analysis transformed the life sciences, creating fields of inquiry such as genomics, proteomics, etc. With the mass adoption of the Internet in our daily lives, and the ability to capture high resolution data on its use, we are at the threshold of a fundamental shift not only in our understanding of the social and behavioral sciences, but also the ways in which we study them. Massively multiplayer online games and virtual worlds have become increasingly popular and have communities comprising millions. They serve as unprecedented sites to theorize and empirically model the social and behavioral dynamics of individuals, groups, and networks within large communities.

This talk presents initial findings from a major interdisciplinary project investigating these phenomena. A unique resource available to the research team is access to the server logs including all behavioral traces (actions, interactions, and transactions) from one of the world's largest Massively Multiplayer Online (MMO) games, EverQuest 2. The talk will describe how this research offers new insights as well as challenges and opportunities for advancing social, behavioral and computational science.

Speaker bio:
Jaideep Srivastava is a professor at the University of Minnesota, where he has established and led a research laboratory which conducts research in the information and knowledge aspects of computing. He has supervised 24 Ph.D. dissertations and 50 M.S. theses, and authored or co-authored over 200 papers in refereed journals and conferences. Dr Srivastava have served on the editorial boards of various journals, including IEEE TPDS, IEEE TKDE, and the VLDB journal. He has also served as Program and Conference Chair for a number of prominent conferences, especially in the area of data mining, and is on the Steering Committee for the PAKDD series of conferences. He has delivered a number of keynote addresses, plenary talks, and invited tutorials at major conferences.

Dr Srivastava has a very active interaction with the industry, in both consulting and executive roles. Specifically, during a 2-year sabbatical during 1999-2001, he lead a corporate data mining team at Amazon.com and built a data analytics department at Yodlee from the ground up. More recently, he spent two years as the Chief Technology Officer for Persistent Systems, where he built an R&D division and oversaw the redesign of the training and technical vitalization program for 2,200+ engineers. He has provided technology and technology strategy advice to a number of large corporations including Cargill, United Technologies, IBM, Honeywell, 3M, and Eaton. He has served in an advisory capacity to a number of small companies, including Lancet Software and Infobionics. Dr Srivastava has also played an active advisory role in the government sector. Specifically, he has served as the US federal government's expert witness in a nationally significant tax case. He is presently serving as Senior Technology Advisor to the State of Minnesota, and is on the Technology Advisory Council to the Chief Minister of Maharashtra, India. He is a Fellow of the IEEE, and has been an IEEE Distinguished Visitor.

Time: Wednesday 27th August, 15:00
Place: Aalborg University, Selma Lagerløfs vej 300, room 0.2.13 (to be confirmed)

Six new members of staff, Bin, Christian C, Darius, Dingming, Liu, and Simon, will present themselves and answer questions.
We expect that refreshments and snacks will be served.
Be there or be square!

Time: Friday 22th August, 9:30 am
Place: Aalborg University, Selma Lagerløfs vej 300, room 0.2.13 (to be confirmed)

Abstract:
Spatial and spatio-temporal knowledge is increasingly applied in a variety of unconventional, i.e. not-the-usual-GIS, application areas. Two of those areas, which are subject of this talk, are information security and privacy. In information security a novel challenge is how to use spatial information to ensure stronger protection of sensitive resources. Although such a vision is not new, as it was pioneered by Dorothy Denning et al. in 1996, core research has started only in the last few years following the widespread use of mobile applications. In this talk, I will overview the research we have carried out to introduce the spatial dimension into access control, with particular concern for access control into the mobile context. I will overview the main ideas behind the GEO-RBAC model and then discuss some open issues which call for more flexible spatial data management solutions. Another area in which spatial knowledge can play an important role for the protection of sensitive information is location privacy. I will overview the motivations behind the approach we are investigating to safeguard location privacy.

Maria Luisa Damiani, Assistant Professor at the University of Milan since 2003. Prior experience in applied research in private and public companies in Italy, mostly in the areas of database, knowledge representation and geographical data management and applications. Currently, the research activity is focused on location-based security and privacy, spatio-temporal modeling and advanced geographical applications in geology and humanities.

Time: Friday 11th April, 13.00 pm
Place: Aalborg University, Selma Lagerløfs vej 300, room 0.2.13

Abstract:
I will give a brief introduction to some of my research in text mining, data mining, XML database and data warehouse. I will focus on research problems, but not go into the detailed algorithms. My main purpose is to get you know some of my past research topics to see if I could contribute to your research projects in some way. More specifically, I plan to introduce the following research problems:

1. Extracting question-answer pairs from online forums (e.g. http://www.tripadvisor.com/ForumHome). The question-answer pairs extracted from the Web could be used to enrich the knowledge base of community based question-answer service, such as Yahoo! Answers (http://answers.yahoo.com/).

2. Mining Gene Expression Data. This includes two sub-problems. First, we design algorithms for mining association rules from high-dimensional data with a few samples. Second, we make use of the discovered rules to build classifiers to classify gene expression data.

3. Querying XML with update syntax. Transform query is a kind of composite query newly proposed by W3C XQuery Update Working draft (http://www.w3.org/TR/2006/WD-xqupdate-20060127/). A transform query is defined in terms of XML update syntax. When a transform query is posed on an XML tree T, it returns another XML tree that would be produced by executing its embedded update on T, without destructive impact on T. Transform queries support a variety of applications, e.g. the enforcement of XML access control, XML message transformation, and XML hypothetical queries.

4. Partial evaluation in Distributed Query Evaluation. The problem is to evaluate XML queries over a tree that is fragmented, both horizontally and vertically over a number of sites.

5. Data cleaning. The problem is to repair inconsistencies from the data warehouse. The inconsistencies here are violations of functional dependencies and conditional functional dependencies.

On Friday, April 11, 9.15-10, Jesper Andersen will give a talk on "Oracle's Development Strategy." In his talk, he will give a brief overview of Oracle's products and strategy, and he talk about the newest developments at Oracle.

The talk will take place in the auditorium. All staff and students in Department of Computer Science are welcome.

About Jesper:
Jesper Andersen is senior vice president of application development at Oracle where he is responsible for initiatives that cross Business Applications, including Application Integration Architecture (AIA) and overall Industry Application Strategy. He brings more than 15 years of development and technical experience to his role with the company.

Prior to Oracle, Mr. Andersen was general manager and group vice president at PeopleSoft, responsible for product strategy, development, quality and customer support activities related to PeopleSoft's core technology platforms. He has also served as executive vice president of products for Pivotal Corp. where oversaw product definition, development, marketing, quality assurance and technology vision. Before joining Pivotal, Mr. Andersen held numerous roles in Oracle's development organization where he built and launched Oracle's first on demand Applications.

Mr. Andersen holds a master's degree in computer science from Aalborg University in Denmark.

The Department of Computer Science, Aalborg University has several Ph.D. scholarships available with an application deadline of May 5, 2008.

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.

The monthly salary is approximately DKK 24.000 (and free fruit!).

Further information about the position and the application procedure can be found at http://stillinger.aau.dk/vis.php?nr=4063.

Please note that applications via email will NOT be considered.

Assistant, Associate, and Full Professor Positions Available

In the Department of Computer Science at Aalborg University, Denmark, a number of assistant, associate, and full 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:

Full professor: http://stillinger.aau.dk/vis.php?nr=4023
Firm deadline: May 1, 2008

Associate professor: http://stillinger.aau.dk/vis.php?nr=4022
Firm deadline: April 1, 2008

Assistant professor: http://stillinger.aau.dk/vis.php?nr=4021
Firm deadline: April 1, 2008

Please read the announcements carefully and follow the instructions there. Note that electronic applications are NOT accepted.

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) or Christian S. Jensen (csj "-at-" cs.aau.dk).

Time: Tuesday 11th March, 14.00 pm
Place: Aalborg University, Selma Lagerløfs vej 300, room 0.2.13

In partial fulfillment of the terms for obtaining the Ph.D. degree, Gyõzõ Gidófalvi will give a lecture on the following subject:
"Spatio-Temporal Data Mining for Location-Based Services"

Abstract:
Location-Based Services (LBS) are continuously gaining popularity. Innovative LBSes integrate knowledge about the users into the service. Such knowledge can be derived by analyzing the location data of users. Such data contain two unique dimensions, space and time, which need to be analyzed. The objectives of the presented thesis are three-fold. First, to extend popular data mining methods to the spatio-temporal domain. Second, to demonstrate the usefulness of the extended methods and the derived knowledge in promising LBS examples. Finally, to eliminate privacy concerns in connection with spatio-temporal data mining by devising systems for privacy-preserving location data collection and mining.
Read the complete abstract.

Members of the assessment committee are Professor Xiaofang Zhou, School of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering, University of Queensland, Australia, Group Leader Agnès Voisard, Fraunhofer ISST, Germany, and Associate Professor Simonas Saltenis, Chairman, Aalborg University, Denmark.

All interested parties are welcome. After the defense the department is hosting a small reception in the cluster of group 3.

Time: Friday 7 March, 14.30 pm
Place: Aalborg University, Selma Lagerløfs vej 300, the Auditorium

Torben Bach Pedersen has been appointed full professor of Computer Science for his research within business intelligence topics such as data warehousing, On-Line Analytical Processing, multidimensional databases, data integration, and data mining, with a focus on complex application areas such as web, sound, and sensor data, and location-based services (link to press release).

In this connection Torben Bach Pedersen will give a lecture.

Programme
14:30   Welcoming – Institute for Computer Science, Head of Institute Kristian G. Olesen. Lecture by Torben Bach Pedersen 15.30   Reception

Link to Torben's webpage.

Torben Bach Pedersen from Daisy has been appointed to Full Professor of Computer Science from February 1, 2008.
Prof. Pedersens research concerns business intelligence topics such as data warehousing, On-Line Analytical Processing, multidimensional databases, data integration, and data mining, with a focus on complex application areas such as web, sound, and sensor data, and location-based services.

Link to Torben's webpage.

Nordjyske, the leading newspaper in Northern Jutland, features a story on the European Internet Accessibility Observatory (EIAO) project. The story describes how the EIAO system will help make the web more accessible for people with various disabilities.

Full story here.

Professor Christian S. Jensen has been elected Fellow of the IEEE for contributions to temporal, spatio-temporal, and mobile data management.

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 37 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 IEEE Fellow Program: The grade of Fellow recognizes unusual distinction in the profession and is conferred upon a person with an extraordinary record of accomplishments. The accomplishments that are being honored have contributed importantly to the advancement or application of engineering, science and technology, bringing the realization of significant value to society.

Announcement in Danish.

In partial fulfillment of the terms for obtaining the Ph.D. degree, Christian Thomsen will give a lecture on the following subject:

"Aspects of Data Warehouse Technologies for Complex Web Data"

Thursday 17th of January 2008, 13.00 in room 0.2.13 SL300

Abstract:
This lecture is about aspects of specification and development of data warehouse technologies for complex web data. Large amounts of data exist in different web resources and in different formats. But it is often hard to analyze and query the often big and complex data or data about the data. It is therefore interesting to apply Data Warehouse (DW) technology to the data. But to apply DW technology to complex web data is not straightforward and the DW community faces new and exciting challenges. The presented thesis considers some of these challenges.

Members of the assessment committee are Professor A Min Tjoa, Vienna University of Technology, Austria, Associate Professor Matteo Golfarelli, University of Bologna, Italy, and Associate Professor Simonas Saltenis, Chairman, Aalborg University, Denmark.

Click here to read the complete abstract of the lecture.

In partial fulfillment of the terms for obtaining the Ph.D. degree, Nikolaus Augsten will give a lecture on the following subject:

"Approximate Matching of Hierarchical Data"

Friday 11th of January 2008, 14.00 in room 02.13 SL300

Abstract:
The goal of this thesis is to design, develop, and evaluate new methods for the approximate matching of hierarchical data represented as labeled trees. In approximate matching scenarios two items should be matched if they are similar. Computing the similarity between labeled trees is hard as in addition to the data values also the structure must be considered. A well-known measure for comparing trees is the tree edit distance. It is computationally expensive and leads to a prohibitively high run time. Our solution for the approximate matching of hierarchical data are pq-grams.

Associate Professor Torben Bach Pedersen from Daisy has been granted 1.1 million DKK from the Danish Research Council for Technology and Innovation for the project "AOBI: Agile and Open Business Intelligence." The project will explore the adaption of agile development methods, well-known in traditional software development, to fit the special characteristics of business intelligence (BI) projects. It will also explore the use of open source software for BI. The combination of these two can serve to significantly lower the cost of entry for a new BI solution, meaning that it will become feasible even for small enterprises to use BI. The project will also involve Daisy member Christian Thomsen, who will be hired as a post-doc on the project.

The Friday, November 30, cover story of Version 2, with 83,379 copies the largest IT magazine in Denmark, features an interview with Associate Professor Torben Bach Pedersen from Daisy. Here he shares his views on the bad data quality often found in Danish companies and its implications for business intelligence. The problems can potentially mean loss of income and customer trust.

You can read the full story here.

On Friday, 7th December, it will take place the annual Christmas celebration in Daisy. The event will be hold in our new building "Cassiopeia" located in Selma Lagerlöfs Vej 300, and will open with a presentation by Dr. Xuegang Huang regarding the work he is currently involved in on Data Warehousing in Danske Bank.

The lecture will be followed by a reception and some refreshments in room 0.2.13. During this second part of the event the participants will have the opportunity to talk and exchange ideas with both the Daisy group members as well as external partners.

Abstract for the talk:
Data Warehouses were first developed in the late 1980s to meet a growing demand for information management and analysis that could not be met by operational systems. After nearly two decade's development, the data warehousing technology has enabled most enterprises in our planet to establish their data warehouses and new issues are still upcoming due to the growing and changing business requirements.
The concept of enterprise data warehouse (EDW) has evolved from a simple data store of an organization's historical data to an active repository that consolidates data of various source systems, feeds high quality data to support critical business intelligence applications, and simplifies the management of metadata and master data in the data integration process.
In this presentation, we will go over the past of data warehousing concepts and discuss quite a few popular EDW issues in the current technology world.

TARGIT and researchers from Daisy have just started a 3 year research project that aims to improve the quality of the decisions that are made based on TARGIT's BI Suite system. The goal is to develop a method that allows the user to get an overview of any situation faster and more precisely, and thus become even better at making decisions and reacting dynamically in relation to the surrounding world.

The Daisy BI researchers, led by Associate Professor Torben Bach Pedersen, are experts in utilizing complex and web-based data for BI purposes, which opens new possibilities for the types of data managers can base their decisions on.

"The faster a manager can react with a correct and thorough analysis and a subsequent decision, the better are the chances that the enterprise can react dynamically to a critical event. In the complex and globalized world that we live in, this requires a kind of "radar" in the BI tools, and this radar is what we are going to set a new standard for together with the researchers from Daisy. The research group is internationally renowned, so we have great expectations for the research in the coming years" says TARGIT CTO Morten Middelfart.

You can find more information in the press release and read the story in Version2, Nordjyske, DitCentrum and Teknikogviden.

Ph.D. Tuition Waiver Scholarships for Ph.D. study at Daisy are now available.

These scholarships do not cover living expenses. However, Daisy is able to offer exceptional applicants the employment necessary for them to cover their living expenses.

For further information about the scholarships, see http://stillinger.aau.dk/phd_scholarships_ins.pdf.

The deadline is November 30, so act now!

Abstract:
We are going to demonstrate how Record/Replay technology can be use to analyze difficult software problems: memory corruption, race conditions (including race conditions in network applications), etc.

The Record/Replay technology allows the user to efficiently record the execution of the virtual machine and then replay it with instruction-level precision. This makes all bugs 100% reproducible and enables debugging techniques that were not feasible before.

There will be a few demos: one will demonstrate basic record/replay on Windows, one will show more advanced use, and will show how record/replay can be used for Linux application debugging. We are going to explain how recording of software running in production allows doing correctness inspection and forensics research - with no downtime.

About the speaker:
Gustav Wibling is a staff engineer at VMware. He joined VMware in August 2001 and has worked on several different projects since then. Currently Gustav is the technical lead for the VMCI framework. Before joining VMware Gustav graduated at University of Aarhus, Denmark with a masters in Computer Science.

Efficient adaptive retrieval and mining in large multimedia databases
There is tremendous growth in multimedia data in application domains such as medicine, engineering, biology and numerous others. Content-based similarity search and knowledge extraction are required to access and explore this data in a meaningful way. Similarity models should reflect application needs to ensure effectiveness of retrieval and mining. Moreover, as multimedia databases are typically large and high-dimensional, efficiency is a crucial aspect. We sketch some of the major challenges in retrieval and mining for different types of data. Novel approaches for efficient and effective database access are presented. Experiments demonstrate quality improvements as well as superior runtime performance compared to existing approaches.

Bio sketch:
Ira Assent is currently a Ph.D. student and research assistant at RWTH Aachen University, Germany. Her research interests are in efficient similarity search and subspace clustering in large multimedia databases. In 2003 she received her Diplom (equivalent to M.Sc.) in computer science from RWTH Aachen University.

• Java in Embedded Systems
• Enabling Technologies for Mobile 2.0

Alon Halevy of Google to lecture two days on data integration.

Alon will explain why data integration is hard, and he will cover the fundamentals of data integration, the requirements for data integration, and the commercial state of the art.

Read more [here]

The summer 2007 issue of the Informer - the quarterly newsletter of the British Computer Society's Information Retrieval Specialist Group (IRSG) - features an article by ISOUND's Maria M. Ruxanda on the status of the project. Maria participated in the IRSG's Summer School on Multimedia Semantics in Glasgow, July 15-21, 2007.

Read more [here].

Two days of lectures by CMU professor Christos Faloutsos. [homepage] [dblp]

At Daisy, we are proud to host Christos Faloutsos, who will be lecturing on the discovery of patterns in streams and graphs on July 5 and 6, 2007.

Read more [here].

Computer Scientists at Aalborg University help the disabled using the world wide web.

The article is available in Danish [here]

At this year's European ITS conference, to take place in Aalborg from June 18 to 20, Daisy staff are involved in a wide range of activities:

Presentation of papers

An open platform for the creation and deployment of
transport-related mobile data services.
Monday 18 June, 11.00 - 12.30
Ph.D. Student Rico Wind
Bondestuen

Recovery of vehicle trajectories from tracking data for
analysis purposes
Monday 18 June, 16.00 - 17.30
Ph.D. Student Dalia Tiesyte
Laugstuen

Map matching for Intelligent Speed Adaptation
Monday 18 June, 11.00 - 12.30
Ph.D. Student Nerius Tradisauskas
Latinerstuen

Cab-sharing: an effective, door-to-door, on-demand
transportation service
Tuesday 19 June, 9:00 - 10:30
Ph.D. Student Gyozo Gidofalvi
Laugstuen

Special Session on delivering mobile services.
Tuesday 19 June, 14.00 - 15.30
Professor Christian S. Jensen
Gæstesalen

Executive Session on mobility services.
Tuesday 19 June, 11.00 - 12.30
Professor Christian S. Jensen
Det Lille Teater

Explaining the future to 9'th graders
The mobile phone as the platform of the future
Wednesday 20 June, 10.45 - 11.00
Rico Wind

Exhibition
The Streamspin team will be present in the lobby throughout the conference.

Come join us!

A Flexible Approach for Hiding User Location

Man Lung Yiu
Department of Computer Science
Aalborg University

Thursday, June 1, 12:30
Fredrik Bajers Vej 7, E3-109

Recently, location-based service users are increasingly aware of their privacy — they hope to enjoy location-based services without disclosing their exact locations.

Existing location privacy protection methods can be broadly classified into: (i) spatial cloaking techniques, and (ii) cryptographic matching solutions. The former requires complex server implementations and transmits huge number of unnecessary objects over communication network. On the other hand, the latter does not offer guarantee on the accuracy of results.

To overcome all the above problems, we propose a novel approach, called SpaceTwist, for hiding user location. Its main advantages are: a high degree of privacy can be achieved, the user has flexibility to control the search process dynamically, and the server implementation is simple.

In addition, we develop a granular searching technique to reduce the communication cost while guaranteeing the accuracy bound of the returned results. Experimental results on real datasets show that our technique retrieves results with good accuracy at low communication cost.

Researcher to lecture at the EII Winter School this summer.

This summer, Daisy director Christian S. Jensen will lecture on data management for mobile services at the EII Winter School, to take place at the Women's College at The University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia.

EII is short for Enterprise Information Infrastructure and is an initiative under the Australian Research Council. The initiative offers a unique Australian opportunity to bring the best researchers in different aspects of EIS to make a substantial impact on this most important contemporary ICT goal providing scalable solutions for globally deployable Enterprise Computing Environments.

The EII initiative focuses on fundamental issues which can be found in emerging applications, such as enterprise information systems, supply chain management, customer relation management, enterprise resources planning, financial data analysis, e-Health, e-Education, e-Science, web services, bioinformatics, environmental information systems and location-based services.

Read more [here]

Creating Mashups with Google Earth
by Nerius Tradisauskas

Using Amazon Virtual Computing Web Services by Rico Wind

Center for Data-intensive Systems
Department of Computer Science
Aalborg University

Friday, April 27, 14.30
Fredrik Bajers Vej 7, E3-109

In this open seminar, two of today's hot topics will be treated.

Mashups, utilizing other services through their open API, are gaining widespread popularity (see http://www.programmableweb.com/ for a large repository).

The first presentation will illustrate how to do mashups with Google Earth.
The presentation will show how to create the KML (Keyhole Markup Language) files that can be understood and displayed by Google Earth. The data is feed to Google Earth in a predefined XML format.

The data used for illustration are user routes collected in the "Spar paa farten" project. Several Google Earth features will be illustrated, both by using the routes directly and by extracting statistical information about user's behaviour over time.

In addition, the presentation will show how the KML files can be used in Google Maps, which does not require the user to install a desktop application.

The second presentation will show how to use two of Amazon's web services,
EC2 and S3, for virtual computing and storage.

S3 allows users to programmatically store and retrieve objects using Amazon's servers. All communication is done using web services, and the user is billed according to usage. Because the user only pays for the actual storage space used and the traffic generated, this solution is suitable for a wide range of applications. Objects can be made publicly available, thus allowing other persons to retrieve the objects using HTTP (e.g., it is possible to put up images and allow other people to view some of them).

EC2 allows users to start virtual computers (each one equivalent to 1.7Ghz
x86 processor, 1.75GB of RAM, 160GB of local disk) using web services.
Amazon provides a number of images based on different Linux distributions, and several users have made images available to the public as well. In addition, it is possible to create and upload custom images. Amazon provides tools for this process (available on the Linux platform). When a virtual computer has been started, the user has root access (using SSH and public/private keys for log in) to the computer.

After the workshop, there will be refreshments.

Apr. 19. 2007

Associate Professor Torben Bach Pedersen shares his views on the increasing amounts of RFID and sensor data in Danish magazine Computerworld (April 17, 2007).

Read the article [here]

Apr. 20. 2007

Associate Professor Torben Bach Pedersen discusses a project in Computerworld (April 19, 2007) that concerns the extraction of usable data from text files in the context of datawarehousing.

Read the article [here]

How to develop and share mobile services with streamspin

The streamspin team

Center for Data-intensive Systems
Department of Computer Science
Aalborg University

Friday, April 20, 14.30
Fredrik Bajers Vej 7, E3-109

In this open workshop, we will show how to create, deploy, and share new mobile services with streamspin.

Streamspin enables seamless integration of a variety of mobile services in one mobile application. In particular, developers can use streamspin's freely available API for service development.

The API makes it possible to list services in the streamspin service directory, to apply advanced setup forms in services, and to easily push rich content to users. In addition, service developers can access real-time tracking information about the users of a given service through a very simple interface.

All communication and tracking is done by the streamspin backend, and service developers can access all of this functionality with just a few web service calls.

During the workshop it will be demonstrated how to use these web services, including the setup of call-back mechanisms for the real-time user tracking.
A demonstration will be given based on a scenario where an online shopping list is "streamspin enabled."

The workshop ends with a discussion where questions, feedback, and suggestions from the audience for future directions will be appreciated.

After the workshop there will be refreshments.

Don't miss next week's Daisy seminar, which includes two talks:

Mashups with Google Earth.

Virtual computing and storage made simple using web services.

At the Faculty of Engineering, Science, and Medicine, Department of Computer Science a position as Postdoc in database technologies (position no. P27003) is open for appointment from 01.09.2007.

Job description:
The position is available from 01.09.2007 or soon after. The position is initially for one year.

The Center for Data-intensive Systems (see http://www.daisy.aau.dk/ for additional information) in the Department of Computer Science is looking for a talented postdoctoral researcher to participate in the research project “Intelligent Sound.”

The applicant should hold a Ph.D. in computer science or a closely related field and have an excellent track record in one or more of the following areas:

• Music information retrieval
• Multimedia databases
• Multidimensional databases
• Database indexing and query processing

The position is funded by the Danish Research Council for Technology and Production and will focus on aspects of database technologies for music information retrieval. The topic of the research program is representation, search, and retrieval of multimedia information, including music, speech, and natural sound. The “Intelligent Sound” project is a collaborative effort carried out between the Technical University of Denmark and Aalborg University. For more details consult http://www.intelligentsound.org./

Limited teaching within the area can be expected.

[more]

The streamspin team

Center for Data-intensive Systems
Department of Computer Science
Aalborg University

Friday, March 30, 14.15
Location: A4-106

The Internet has recovered from the dot-com crash of the early 2000's and now features an abundance of new, innovative technologies and services. We are also witnessing the rapid emergence of a communication and computing infrastructure that encompasses millions of people with mobile devices, such as mobile phones, with Internet connectivity. This infrastructure will enable the Internet to go mobile.

This talk describes the background and aspirations of a new research project that is concerned with data management aspects of innovative mobile Internet services. The project envisions a website that enables users to easily create and publish service, to build communities, and to use the available services. Services will often be push-based and context aware.

The approach of the project is to build and evolve a testbed platform that is capable of enabling the functionality provided by the portal. This way, new services will continually be made available to external users.

In addition to covering the vision underlying the project, the talk covers two geo-context components that are being integrated into the system. The first component aims to support the delivery of location-enabled services that rely on the tracking of the continuously changing positions of entire populations of mobile-service users. The second component aims to extend the geo-context of a user to include not only the user's current location, but also the user's (anticipated) destination and route towards that destination.

After the talk, there will be refreshments, and members of the team will demonstrate example services to those interested.

Several opportunities now exist for applying for a Ph.D. stipend for study at Daisy.

Daisy is covered by a call from the International Doctoral School of Technology and Science at the university's Faculty of Engineering, Science, and medicine. The deadline for applications is April 20, 2007. [more]

The Department of Computer Science has also announced a number of stipends for study within any of the areas covered by the department. The deadline for applications is April 30, 2007. [more]

Finally, Daisy has announced an international stipend. The deadline for applications is April 30, 2007. [more]

Contact us if you are interested and need advise.

Apply for a permanent professorship. The university has announced a permanent professor position in the Department of Computer Science. Daisy's research area is one of the areas within which applications are explicitly solicited. The application deadline is May 15. For further information, see link

Daisy is happy to announce that Søren Holdt Jensen, John Johansen, and Harry Lahrmann have agreed to serve on Daisy's advisory board. The board will support the interdisciplinary aspects of Daisy's mission.

Trustworthy Indexing for Compliance Documents

Room E3-109
Feb. 22, 2007
11.00 AM

Marianne Winslett
L3S and University of Illinois

New regulations in the US are requiring companies to retain extensive records about their operations, for periods as long as 30 years. These records must be managed in special ways to ensure that they are trustworthy, i.e., accurate and available when needed. In response to these new regulations, a large market for compliance storage devices has developed in just a few years. In this talk, I will explain what compliance storage is, and talk about how to create a trustworthy index for compliance documents.
This work was done with Soumadeb Mitra and Windsor Hsu, and received the best paper award at VLDB 2006.

The Department of Computer Science, Aalborg University and Daisy, in collaboration with the Centre for Embedded Software Systems (CISS) has an opening for a fully funded 3-year PhD position in the LandIT project.

The LandIT project is an industrial collaboration project that aims to build technologies for communication and data integration between farming devices and other farming-related IT systems, both for operational and business intelligence purposes. The PhD project will concern real-time data integration for farming devices.

Qualifications needed: An M.S. in Computer Science or a closely related field from a recognized institution, with excellent results. Potential candidates should have a strong background in databases, algorithms and data structures, and networking/communication technologies. Additionally, a background in data warehousing, business intelligence, data integration, and XML technologies is highly desirable.

Good communication skills in English, oral as well as written, are essential.

The monthly salary is approximately DKK 24.000.

The application deadline is February 15, 2007. Potential applicants should contact Associate Professor Torben Bach Pedersen (tbp at cs.aau.dk).

Further information about the position and the application procedure can be found here.

Please note that applications via email will NOT be considered.