Declarative, optimizable data-driven specifications of web & mobile reports & applications

Speaker:        Prof. Yannis Papakonstantinou
                Computer Science and Engineering Department
                University of California at San Diego

Title:          "Declarative, optimizable data-driven specifications of
                 web & mobile reports & applications"

Date:           Tuesday, 17 December 2013

Time:           3:00pm - 4:00pm

Venue:          Room 4505 (via lifts 25/26),HKUST


Abstract:

Developers of web and mobile Ajax applications write too much low level
"plumbing" code to efficiently access, integrate and coordinate
application state that resides on the multiple tiers of the architecture,
and is accessed using different languages: SQL at the database server;
HTML and Javascript at the browser, which in HTML5 includes its own
database state; Java or other programming languages at the application
server.

The FORWARD project replaces such low level programming by providing to
the (non-guru) developer a programming abstraction where the web
application is treated as a single state machine. FORWARD's cornerstones
are (i) the unified application state virtual database, which enables
manipulating the entire application state in an extension of SQL, named
SQL++ (ii) specification of Ajax pages as essentially rendered views over
the unified application state. The state machine abstraction replaces
manual coding efforts by system-provided data-related optimizations and
automations.


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Biography:

Yannis Papakonstantinou (http://db.ucsd.edu/people/yannis.htm) is a
Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of
California, San Diego. holds a Diploma of Electrical Engineering from the
National Technical University of Athens, MS and Ph.D. in Computer Science
from Stanford University (1997) and an NSF CAREER award for his work on
data integration.  His research is in the intersection of data management
technologies and the web, where he has published over eighty research
articles. He has given multiple tutorials and invited talks, has served on
journal editorial boards and has chaired and participated in program
committees for many international conferences and workshops.

Yannis enjoys to commercialize his research and to inform his research
accordingly. He was the CEO and Chief Scientist of Enosys Software, which
built and commercialized an early XML-based Enterprise Information
Integration platform. Enosys Software was acquired in 2003 by BEA Systems.
His lab's FORWARD platform (for the rapid development of data-driven Ajax
applications) is now in use by many commercial applications. He is
involved in data analytics in the pharmaceutical industry and is in the
technical advisory board of Brightscope Inc.