Jour Fixe - Towards Democratizing Data Science

Technology has been the key enabler of the current Big Data movement. Without open-source tools like TensorFlow and Spark, as well as the advent of cheap, abundant computing and storage in the cloud, the trend toward datafication of almost every field in research and industry could never have happened. However, the current Big Data tool set is ill-suited for an efficient knowledge discovery by domain experts with only limited IT skills and thus represents a major bottleneck in our data-drivensociety. In this talk, I will present an overview of my current research efforts to revisit the Big Data stack from the user interface to the underlying hardware for making Big Data tools more efficient and easier to use for domain experts and thus enablethe democratization of data science.

Speaker Bio: Carsten Binnig is a Full Professor in the Computer Science department at TU Darmstadt and an Adjunct Associate Professor in the Computer Science department at Brown University. Carsten received his PhD at the University of Heidelberg in 2008. Afterwards, he spent time as a postdoctoral researcher in the Systems Group at ETH Zurich and at SAP working on in-memory databases. Currently, his research focus is on the design of data management systems for modern hardware as well as modern workloads suchas interactive data exploration and machine learning. His work has been awarded with a Google Faculty Award, as well as multiple best paper and best demo awards for his research.