The PODS 2006 call for papers is out. It will be held in Chicago along with SIGMOD.

The PODS symposium series, held in conjunction with the SIGMOD conference series, provides a premier annual forum for the communication of new advances in the theoretical foundation of database systems. For the 25th edition, original research papers providing new insights in the specification, design, or implementation of data management tools are called for.

The SIGMOD call for papers is out. It will be held in Chicago (cool!).

The annual ACM SIGMOD conference is a leading international forum for database researchers, developers, and users to explore cutting-edge ideas and results, and to exchange techniques, tools, and experiences. We invite the submission of original research contributions as well as proposals for demonstrations, tutorials, industrial presentations, and panels. We encourage submissions relating to all aspects of data management defined broadly and particularly encourage work that represent deep technical insights or present new abstractions and novel approaches to problems of significance. We especially welcome submissions that help identify and solve data management systems issues by leveraging knowledge of applications and related areas, such as information retrieval and search, operating systems & storage technologies, and web services.

You know TeX, you know HTML and you don’t like PDF or PowerPoint slides? Leverage the fact that Firefox supports MathML and your troubles are over!

Following one of my earlier posts, Peter Jipsen was nice enough to email me to let me know that ASCIIMathML officially works with both HTML Slidy and S5. Peter has proof in the form of an online set of slides.

Jan Miczaika from the Otto Beisheim Graduate School of Management just sent me an email. Their movie (DVD) recommender system hitflip (German site) is using the Slope One collaborative filtering algorithm I presented at SIAM Data Mining 2005. I believe he found useful the technical report I wrote about it (Implementing a Rating-Based Item-to-Item Recommender System in PHP/SQL).

Jan had interesting comments:

• Instead of working live, you can replace the INSERTs to your DMBS by some INSERT DELAYED and do batch processing. We had thought about this option with inDiscover, but it proved to be unnecessary for us, even using MySQL which has relatively slow INSERTs. Batch processing is an ok alternative when ressources are limited, but, myself, I prefer true online systems.
• Brand new DVDs that have not been rated a sufficient number of times (say twice) are not recommended and one trick you can use is to recommend new DVDs which are similar to DVDs the user might like. This is a form of cold start problem and Jan’s solution appears pretty generic and sensible.
• In his experience, it is useful to precompute recommendations for users, only updating them when this particular user enters new data. Of course, in theory, you should invalidate these recommendations continuously as new data (form other users) is entered. But Jan felt it was “close enough” I suspect.

PageRank is this well known Google measure of how influential a web page is.

I can also compare the PageRank of some researcher’s home page…

Conclusions so far:

1. Larger English-speaking schools get a higher PageRank. In Canada, the largest school, the University of Toronto had the top school (equal to Stanford). Somewhat smaller but very reputable schools like McGill don’t stand out.
2. There seems to be no obvious correlation between the PageRank of a researcher and its university’s. This is somewhat surprising. Researchers at Laval University scored really badly for example, despite a solid PageRank for their university.