Distinguished Lecture Series
Joseph Hellerstein
University of California, Berkeley
Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences
& Director, Intel Research Berkeley
Host: James Kurose
In recent years, intriguing connections have emerged between database and networking research. Enthusiasm for streaming queries has reinvigorated the database community's interest in dataflow architectures and algorithms -- which are increasingly reminiscent of high-function routing schemes. Simultaneously, the networking research community has been exploring enhanced data processing functionality in the network, both in Internet-based overlay networks, and in wireless sensor networks. Many of the themes in that research have strong echoes of the relational database revolution of the 1970s.
In this talk I will present my perspective on collaborative efforts at the boundaries of these fields, focusing on both global-scale Internet systems and tiny sensor networks. While my work began as an effort to design database query architectures for networked environments, the collaborations have increasingly led to basic entanglements between querying processing and core network functions like routing. This has led to speculation about a future Internet that relies on -- or is indistinguishable from -- a massively distributed query engine.
Joseph M. Hellerstein is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of California, Berkeley, and is the Director of Intel Research, Berkeley. Hellerstein's research focuses on data management and networking, including database systems, sensor networks, peer-to-peer and distributed systems.
Hellerstein is an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow, and a recipient of multiple awards, including ACM-SIGMOD's "Test of Time", VLDB Best Paper, IBM's Best Paper in Computer Science, NSF CAREER, NASA New Investigator, and an Okawa Foundation Fellowship. In 1999, MIT's Technology Review named him one of the top 100 young technology innovators worldwide in their inaugural "TR100" list.
Before directing Intel Research Berkeley, Hellerstein was a co-founder of Cohera Corporation (now part of PeopleSoft), where he served as Chief Scientist from 1998-2001. Key ideas from his research have been incorporated into commercial and open-source database systems including IBM's DB2 and Informix, PeopleSoft's Catalog Management, and the open-source PostgreSQL system. Hellerstein currently serves on the technical advisory boards of a number of software companies, and has served as a member of the advisory boards of ACM SIGMOD and Ars Digita University.
Hellerstein received his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin, a masters degree from UC Berkeley, and a bachelor's degree from Harvard. He spent a pre-doctoral internship at IBM Almaden Research Center, and a post-doctoral internship at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.
