Department of Computer, Control and Management Engineering

The talk will be streamed at https://www.youtube.com/@videodiag-sapienzauniversi4757

Abstract:

As president of ACM, I have proposed the ACM 4.0 Initiative, whose implementation was recently launched publicly. Its goal is to recalibrate ACM for its fourth-quarter century of life and to help computing professionals in serving society through their profession. It comprises 10 presidential task forces (PTFs) that explore some core dimensions of the ACM vision and mission as well as its internal operations. One PTF is focusing on Open Science and how it can be adapted by the research community in computing, as it will play a fundamental role in how science is done in the coming decades.

Open Science is a new paradigm of doing research, which primarily involves making research data, research publications, and other findings openly available to the public. It also leads to new research assessment indicators, new open reviewing processes, and several other changes to the usual mode of scholarly communication, promoting collaboration, transparency, accountability, and reproducibility, resulting to more impactful outcomes for society. Leading the way globally, OpenAIRE is the data infrastructure I have been coordinating, being built to support the European Open Science policies and employing significant computing technology, especially machine learning and big data processing.

Building OpenAIRE has raised significant systems challenges, one of which is the perennial impedance mismatch between programming languages, e.g., Python, predominantly used for ML and other applications, and declarative database languages, i.e., SQL. To obtain the best of both worlds, my team has proposed YeSQL (in contrast of the recently dominant NoSQL trend), which embeds python-based User Defined Functions (UDFs) into SQL in novel ways that capture high expressiveness, high usability in coding, and high performance (from a few factors to almost two orders of magnitude over the competitors).

This talk will start from describing the mission and vision of ACM and the main goals of the ACM 4.0 initiative. It will then dive into the essence of Open Science and what it will bring to our everyday life as researchers, highlighting the key aspects of the OpenAIRE data infrastructure. Finally, it will outline the main characteristics of YeSQL, and its preliminary achievement that promise balancing between the ease of python coding and the scalable performance of database systems.

Bio:

Yannis Ioannidis (Ph.D., Computer Sciences, UC Berkeley; MSc, Applied Mathematics, Harvard University; Diploma, Electrical Engineering, National Technical University of Athens) is the President of the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM). He is a Professor at the Department of Informatics and Telecommunications of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens as well as an Associated Faculty at the “Athena” Research and Innovation Center, where he also served as the President and General Director for 10 years (2011-2021). His research interests include Database and Information Systems, Data Science, Data and Text Analytics, Data Infrastructures and Digital Repositories, Recommender Systems and Personalization, and Human-Computer Interaction, topics on which he has published over 170 articles in leading journals and conferences and also holds four patents. His work is often inspired by and applied to data management and analysis problems that arise in industrial environments or in the context of other scientific fields (Social Sciences and Humanities, Life Sciences, Physical Sciences) and the Arts. He has been the coordinator and legal entity head of OpenAIRE, which implements the European policies on open access to research publications and data. He is the software director of the European Human Brain Projectflagship initiative, the coordinator of the EOSC Future strategic project, which implements the core elements of the European Open Science Cloud, and a coordinator or partner in tens of other European and national research and innovation projects. He has also led or is currently leading the creation of new international or spin-off companies. He is an ACM and IEEE Fellow, a member of Academia Europaea, and a recipient of several research and teaching awards. He is currently the Greek delegate to the European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures (ESFRI) and a co-chair of the Global Climate Hub of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network.