Blackboard buys TerriblyClever

Blackboard, the company that (among other applications) sells the course content management system that Cornell uses, has purchased MobilEdu, a company run by undergraduates from Stanford that developers university-centric services (such as GPS-supported maps, a directory, bills, courses, etc.) for the iPhone. Congratulations to the founders! I can only hope that this will have impact on Blackboard beyond new apps on the iPhone; the interface of the version of the Blackboard course management system that I have used has no Web 2.0 features and is very clunky. In addition, management of assignments and submission of solutions does not work well.

MayBMS demo at SIGMOD

MayBMS demo was presented at the 2009 ACM SIGMOD conference in Providence, RI. This was the first MayBMS demo after its official release on Sourceforge earlier this year. As part of the demonstration we showed two web applications built on top of the MayBMS server. The first one was a human resource management application that uses what-if analysis to aid managerial decisions, and the second one showed how random graphs and social networks can be modeled and queried as probabilistic databases. See the conference poster here.

Bulding an OS for netbooks with two developers

Techcrunch reported on July 8 that besides Google, French company Jolicloud is building an operating system for netbooks. They seem to be building on Linux, but what impressed me most is that their team consists of just two developers. I found this encouraging for us at a university where we are always limited by just working with a few selected graduate students. It is the idea and the people that matter, not the size of the team!

Ashwin's thesis recognized

Cornell DB group alumnus Ashwin Machanavajjhala has won the 2009 ACM SIGMOD Doctoral Dissertation Award honorable mention. Congratulations Ashwin!

Nitin Gupta, with co-author Neha Singh of IIT Bombay, wins first place in the ACM Student Research Competition Grand Finals for their work on XML processing.

VLDB acceptance notifications out

The Cornell DB group got three technical papers and a demo accepted for presentation at this year's VLDB conference in Lyon, France!

Michaela Goetz wins a Microsoft Research Graduate Women's Scholarship. Congratulations Mila!