Small island, big threats

Big Plateaus of Big Data on the Big Island

In ancient texts, 40 was a magic number. It meant a “lot” or “a long time.” 40 years represented the time it took for a new generation to arise. A look back at 40 years of VLDB suggests that this applies to database researchers as well – the young researchers of the early VLDBs are now the old folks of the database world, and a new generation is creating afresh. Over this period many plateaus o...

Big Data LifeCycle: Threats and Security Model

Big data is an emerging term referring to the process of managing huge amount of data from different sources, such as, DBMS, log files, postings of social media. Big data (text, number, images... etc.) could be divided into different forms: structured, semi-structured, and unstructured. Big data could be further described by some attributes like velocity, volume, variety, value, and complexity....

Operational Research for the Real World: big questions from a small island

The address explores three questions that are important for operational research: ‘Where do we come from?’, ‘What are we?’ and ‘Where are we going?’ First, it looks briefly at the history of O.R. from Babbage to Blackett and the importance of a ‘union of theory and practice’ in our work. Then it looks at O.R.’s identity and image and argues that we do have a reasonably clear idea of our identit...

Tupleware: "Big" Data, Big Analytics, Small Clusters

There is a fundamental discrepancy between the targeted and actual users of current analytics frameworks. Most systems are designed for the challenges of the Googles and Facebooks of the world— processing petabytes of data distributed across large cloud deployments consisting of thousands of cheap commodity machines. Yet, the vast majority of users analyze relatively small datasets of up to sev...

Small Island States