Building 99 in Redmond
May 12, 2023

Northwest Database Society (NWDS) Annual Meeting 2023

Location: Hybrid | Redmond, WA

The Northwest Database Society Annual Meeting brings together researchers and practitioners from the greater Pacific Northwest for a day of technical talks and networking on the broad topic of data management systems. The 2023 meeting was held on May 12, 2023. It was a hybrid event: in person and on-line. About 100 people attended in person from 24 companies and universities. Recorded presentations of talks will be posted soon.

Previous Meetings: This was the sixth meeting of the series. Previous meetings were held at University of Washington in 2018 (opens in new tab)Microsoft Research in 2019 (opens in new tab)Amazon in 2020 (opens in new tab)virtually by Google in 2021 (opens in new tab), and University of Washington in 2022 (opens in new tab).

Hashtag: Please use the event hashtag for social media posts: #NWDSMeeting

Agenda: see the second tab “Agenda” at the top of this page.

Keynote

Title: In Computer Architecture, We Don’t Change the Questions, We Change the Answers (video (opens in new tab))

Speaker: Mark D. Hill (opens in new tab), Microsoft Azure and University of Wisconsin-Madison

Mark D. Hill, Microsoft Azure and University of Wisconsin-MadisonAbstract: When I was a new professor in the late 1980s, my senior colleague Jim Goodman told me, “On the computer architecture PhD qualifying exam, we don’t change the questions, we only change the answers.” More generally, I now augment this to say, “In computer architecture, we don’t change the questions, application and technology innovations change the answers, and it’s our job to recognize those changes.” Eternal questions this talk will sample are how best to do the following interacting factors: compute, memory, storage, interconnect/networking, security, power, cooling and one more. The talk will not provide the answers but leave that as an audience exercise. I will dive a little more into compute and memory as in-progress trends provide both challenges and opportunities for creating tremendous value from (large) data.

Biography: Mark D. Hill is Partner Hardware Architect with Microsoft Azure (2020-present) where he leads software-hardware pathfinding. He is also the Gene M. Amdahl and John P. Morgridge Professor Emeritus of Computer Sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~markhill (opens in new tab)), following his 1988-2020 service in Computer Sciences and Electrical and Computer Engineering. His research interests include parallel-computer system design, memory system design, and computer simulation. Hill’s work is highly collaborative with over 160 co-authors. He received the 2019 Eckert-Mauchly Award and is a fellow of AAAS, ACM, and IEEE. He served on the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) 2013-21 including as CCC Chair 2018-20, Computing Research Association (CRA) Board of Directors 2018-20, and Wisconsin Computer Sciences Department Chair 2014-2017. Hill has a PhD in computer science from the University of California, Berkeley.

Contact Information: Phil Bernstein

Last updated: May 14, 2023