Last month EMC held a "University Day" just before the USENIX ATC 2012 event in Boston on June 12-15. This event was the first in a new series of meetings where key university faculty and students gather together to collaborate for a day with EMC technologists.
The event included many prominent university research partners, great keynote speakers, and panels.
Dr. Ian Foster of the University of Chicago delivered a keynote on the “Big Process for Big Data” that surrounded process automation and data-driven science. He was able to tie in the famous Kasparov computer-human as an example, explaining that there needs to be intellectual strength in both the machine and the human operating the machine.
Dr. Kai Li of Princeton University (also the co-founder of Data Domain) talked about the “Exploration of Feature-Rich Data.” I enjoyed Kai's presentation and thoughts on searching video and photo images.
The two panel discussions were led by EMC’s own Rhonda Baldwin and Erik Riedel. These discussions covered the consolidation of both structured and unstructured data in order to run analytics, technical roadblocks in terms of the consumption of information, the challenge of the lifecycle of data, and many other topics.
Jeff Nick, EMC’s CTO, offered his insight into the “Golden Triangle of Innovation,” being the combination of organic innovation, acquisitions and investments, and university collaborations. This was a nice transition to the poster session that displayed the work of 10 Ph.D. students from partnered universities.
The day concluded with a poster sessions by the students in attendance, with the following students taking home the prizes:
1st Place: Raja Sambasivan (CMU) – “Diagnosing Performance Changes by Comparing Request Flows”
2nd Place: Ji-Yong Shin (Cornell) – “Gecko: A Contention-Oblivious Design for Cloud Storage”
3rd Place: Lory Al Moaker (Pitt) – “Adaptive Class-Based Scheduling of Continuous Queries”
Thanks to EMCer Teddy Kinneen for summarizing the event.
Steve
Director, EMC Innovation Network