Oμιλία Γιάννη Ιωαννίδη, 14/05/2008

Ο Γιάννης Ιωαννίδης θα δώσει ομιλία προσκεκλημένος του Τμήματος Πληροφορικής τη Τετάρτη 14/05/2008 στις 13:15 στην αίθουσα Δ21 (πτέρυγα Δεριγνύ, 2ος όροφος).

Τίτλος: Ανοιχτές Αγορές Δεδομένων και Πληροφοριών (Open Agoras of Data and Information).

Abstract:

People's needs for information are often fulfilled through interactions with various kinds of systems that manage content of well known origin and produce deterministic results. These systems allow users to specify or identify the information of their interest quite accurately and provide

results that are of certified quality and invariant to the particular user

asking for them. In some sense, these systems represent closed worlds of

information, where certain desirable characteristics are guaranteed. When

searching for material goods in everyday life, however, people's behavior

and experiences are very different, as they operate in the open world of

commerce. They shop around, try to identify the best choices, make tradeoffs

between various characteristics of what they want to find, negotiate with

the merchants or owners of the goods, and sometimes proceed with purchases

even if they are uncertain of the origin or quality of what they buy.

Furthermore, the entire process may follow dramatically different paths for

different people, affected by personal styles of shopping, different

preferences on the kinds of goods sought and their characteristics, and even by the particular moods of the people at the time, their location, or their

reasons for pursuing particular items. There is an emerging need to

establish `Open Agoras' of information, i.e., distributed environments of

independent information systems, where seeking for information will be

similar to real-life searching for material goods. Interaction with these

systems may occur in several unconventional modalities, user behavior may be personalized and context-dependent, system reaction may be unpredictable, and the information produced as a result may also be personalized and context-dependent, as well as negotiable and of uncertain origin or quality.

This talk explores such Open Agoras of information, identifies some

technical challenges that they raise, and presents some thoughts on how to

address them.

Bio:

Yannis Ioannidis is currently a Professor at the Department of Informatics and Telecommunications of the University of Athens. He received his Diploma in Electrical Engineering from the National Technical University of Athens in 1982, his MSc in Applied Mathematics from Harvard University, and his Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from the University of California at Berkeley in 1986. Immediately after that he joined the faculty of the

Computer Sciences Department of the University of Wisconsin at Madison,

where he became a Professor before finally leaving in 1999. His research

interests include database and information systems, digital libraries,

personalization, scientific systems and workflows, eHealth systems, and

human-computer interaction, topics on which he has published over seventy

articles in leading journals and conferences. He also holds three patents. Yannis is an ACM Fellow (2004) and a recipient of the VLDB "10-Year Best Paper Award" (2003), the "Presidential Young Investigator Award" - PYI (1991), and of several awards for teaching excellence, including the

nation-wide "Xanthopoulos-Pneumatikos Award for Excellence in Academic

Teaching" in Greece (2006) and the "Chancellor's Award for Excellence in

Teaching" at the University of Wisconsin (1996). He has also been a keynote or invited speaker in several conferences (NLDB'08, ICDE'07, ADBIS'06, CIKM'05, ICDT'03, WAIM'01, SSDBM'00, PDP'00, ECDL'98). Yannis has been a (co-)principal investigator in over thirty research projects funded by

various government agencies (USA, Europe, Greece) or private industry. He is currently an Associate Editor of five journals (Information Systems, Journal

of Digital Libraries, Journal of Intelligent Information Systems, Journal of

Digital Curation, and the electronic ACM Digital Symposium Collection) and

has been a member of the program committees of over sixty conferences, six times as (co-)chair (ICDE'09, ADBIS'07, EDBT'06, HDMS'03, VLDB'02, VDB'98,

and SSDBM'97). Yannis currently serves as the ACM Sigmod Vice-Chair (since

July 2005) and is a member of the Scientific Advisory Board of the Max

Planck Institute for Informatics.