Professor Bertram Ludäscher will present the international tutorial at the thirty-first Brazilian Symposium on Databases (SBBD2016) in Salvador-Bahia on October 4-7. SBBD, an official event of the Brazilian Computer Society, is the largest venue in Latin America for presenting and discussing research results in the database domain. The symposium brings together researchers, students, and practitioners from Brazil and abroad for technical sessions, invited talks, and tutorials given by distinguished speakers from the international research community. Ludäscher’s tutorial is titled "Provenance in Databases and Scientific Workflows."
Abstract: In computer science, data provenance describes the lineage and processing history of data as it is transformed through queries or workflows. Different computer science sub-disciplines have studied approaches to capture and exploit provenance, e.g., the systems and programming languages communities. In this tutorial, I will give an overview of basic research questions and results provided by the database and scientific workflow communities. Research in this area ranges from technical studies in database theory (e.g., the use of semi-ring structures to abstract and unify different types of provenance) to more applied techniques (e.g., to efficiently record, store, and query provenance), and various engineering-level questions in-between. Provenance capture and querying capabilities are also playing an increasing role in the reproducibility of scientific workflows, data science applications, the computational sciences. . . . Provenance is a very active research area, and I will end by highlighting some questions and opportunities for future work in databases and workflows.
Ludäscher, who also serves as director of the iSchool's Center for Informatics Research in Science and Scholarship (CIRSS), is a leading figure in data and knowledge management, focusing on the modeling, design, and optimization of scientific workflows, provenance, data integration, and knowledge representation. He joined the iSchool faculty in 2014 and is a faculty affiliate at NCSA and the Department of Computer Science. His current focus includes foundations of provenance and applications; e.g., for automated data quality control and data curation. He received his MS in computer science from the Technical University of Karlsruhe and his PhD in computer science from the University of Freiburg.