Speaker: Dr David Lomet, Microsoft Research

Date & Place: 24 April 2009, Ian Ross Seminar Room, Australian National University

Dr. David Lomet is the Research Director of the Database Research Laboratory at Microsoft Research.  He was the guest of the CSIRO ICT Centre in Canberra where he gave an invited talk on data services. Dr. Lomet shared his vision and that of Microsoft about the emerging area of cloud computing. He also shared with CSIRO researchers what Microsoft is doing to move this area from concept to product.

In this talk, Dr Lomet looked at what is required to produce programs that are dependable. Dependability requires more than just high availability. Rather, a program needs to be "right" as well, solving the problem for which it was designed. This requires a program development infrastructure that can, by means of appropriate abstractions, permits the programmer to focus on his problem, and not be distracted by "systems issues" that arise when high availability is required. He discussed the attributes of good abstractions, then illustrated this in the programming of dependable systems. His "abstraction" is a "natural" stateful programming model for use in the web enterprise setting. The technical meat of the talk was (1) elaborating the nature this abstraction; and (2) supporting this abstraction to achieve good performance.

 David Lomet has been a principal researcher managing the Microsoft Research Database Group at Microsoft Research since 1995. Earlier, he spent seven and a half years at Digital Equipment Corporation. He has been at IBM Research in Yorktown and a Professor at Wang Institute. Dr. Lomet spent a sabbatical at University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne working with Brian Randell. He has a Computer Science Ph.D from the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Lomet has done research and product development in architecture, programming languages, and distributed systems. His primary interest is database systems, focusing on access methods, concurrency control, and recovery. He is one of the inventors of the transaction concept and is an author of over 90 papers and 35 patents. Two papers won SIGMOD "best paper" awards. Dr. Lomet has served on program committees, including SIGMOD, PODS, VLDB, and ICDE. He was ICDE'2000 PC co-chair and VLDB 2006 PC core chair. He is a member of the ICDE Steering Committee and VLDB Board. He is editor-in-chief of the Data Engineering Bulletin since 1992 and past editor of ACM TODS and the VLDB Journal. Dr. Lomet is IEEE Golden Core Member and received IEEE Outstanding Contribution and Meritorious Service Awards. Dr. Lomet is both ACM Fellow and IEEE Fellow.

Dependability, Abstraction, and Programming