A Research Celebration for Prof. John Mylopoulos

Today I’ve attended a Research Celebration honoring Prof. John Mylopoulos’ career. John has done outstanding contributions to the fields of artificial intelligence, databases and software engineering (with more than 300 publications and counting)

I’ve really enjoyed listening the talks OF the bright GROUP OF people gathered today IN Toronto TO pay a tribute TO John.

My short summary OF the talks:

• Jacob Slonim – Dynamic Path Materialization IN Stream Cubes within Itaipu – Customizing DATA Stream Management Systems FOR the Business Environment . Talk about the importance OF just IN TIME analysis OF business events. Continuous Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) IS needed TO discover trends IN the DATA that help managers TO make better (MORE informed) decisions. TO improve the organization efficiency, BAM has TO be done without the help OF IT people, managers must be able TO query AND interpret the DATA by themselves (which means that they need TO have the RIGHT SET OF tools). Question: could we use DATA stream management systems FOR BAM?
• Julio Cesar Sampaio do Prado Leite –
  Surpassing the Function Perspective: The Complexity OF Goal Modeling . Emphasis ON the need OF developing MORE techniques TO manage large goal models (AND even the smallest problems generate huge models). Also he highlighted the importance OF non-functional requirements IN the development process AND the importance OF the transparency quality.
• Renée Miller – Integrating People, Information AND Communities . Talk about the definition OF conceptual structures TO CONNECT islands OF DATA AS explored IN the CLIO project . A novel idea OF the approach IS TO use the conceptual schemas OF the DATA sources (AND NOT just their relational structure) TO improve the quality OF the mappings (the additional information provided by the conceptual SCHEMA helps disambiguating SOME OF the possible integration scenarios)
• Tasos Kementsietsidis AND Yannis Velegrakis – Database MATCH-making: John’s guide on how to establish relationships between seemingly incompatible worlds . Discussion on data sharing approaches between data sources that do NOT conform to a common schema nor use a common vocabulary (i.e. sharing in a highly dynamic context). This is specially useful for all the emerging open data sources (e.g. biological). Also, some comments on mapping adaptation (or how to automatically adapt a mapping after changes on the source or target model)
• Matthias Jarke – Requirements Modeling: Past – Present – Future . Unfortunately, I did not arrive on time for this one but I guess the title says it all. Interesting point in the discussion: Matthias commented that in his university students must take a lab course consisting in developing (in groups) a medium-size software system before taking any course on project management or software engineering. This way, students realize on their own the difficulties of developing software asystems and appreciate more the software engineering courses later on.
• Thodoros Topaloglou – Taxis, Telos, Tropos: a before-after story in Conceptual Modeling Research Review of the main (modeling) languages John has created during his career. Thodoros also explains how he has found very useful conceptual modeling in his professional career as a way to achieve a cross-disciplinary communication.
• Ron Brachman – Some Opportunities for Knowledge Representation and Reasoning in Web Search and Advertising . Web search is still very crude. We are in the third generation of search engines. The first one was based on on-page information (only the page content was used to select the results). The second one used also off-page information (e.g. Google and the page rank algorithms). The third generation answers “the need behind the query”, i.e. the intention. Knowledge representation can help in this challenge but only if it can work at the scale needed by search engines.
• Michael Brodie – John Mylopoulos: Sowing Seeds of Conceptual Modelling Photographic review of John’s career AND identification OF the conditions that make the CURRENT technological AND business context MORE appropriate than ever FOR John’s ideas to become fruitful in the industry.