Keynote Address for CSST Institute, Web Communities: The World Online.

The Web is no longer a static repository of documents; it is a dynamic repository of information that connects people with their passions, and on a more prosaic note, the applications they use in their personal and professional lives. How is the Web evolving as an information source, and how does this affect the future of information discovery? What are the implications of the rapid growth of social networks? How is user-generated content shifting the landscape of publishers on the Web? Technically, these trends have given rise to a new wave of challenges, and led to vigorous research on a number of fronts ranging from social network analysis, information extraction and community information management, massively distributed storage and computing platforms, and placed a premium on hosted service architectures. In this talk, I will discuss these issues and outline some of the solutions that are beginning to emerge.
Raghu has been Professor of Computer Sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and was founder and CTO of QUIQ, a company that pioneered question-answering communities, powering Ask Jeeves' AnswerPoint as well as customer-support for companies such as Compaq.

His research is in the area of database systems, with a focus on data mining, online communities, and web-scale data management.

He has developed scalable algorithms for clustering, decision-tree construction, and itemset counting, and was among the first to investigate mining of continuously evolving, stream data.

His work on query optimization and deductive databases has found its way into commercial database systems, and his work on extending SQL to deal with queries over sequences has influenced the design of window functions in SQL:1999.

His paper on the Birch clustering algorithm received the SIGMOD 10-Year Test-of-Time award, and he has written the widely-used text "database Management Systems" (WCB / McGraw-Hill, with J. Gehrke), now in its third edition.

He is Chair of ACM SIGMOD, on the Board of Directors of ACM SIGKDD and the Board of Trustees of the VLDB Endowment, and has served as editor-in-chief of the Journal of Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery, associate editor of ACM Transactions on Database Systems, and the Database area editor of the Journal of Logic Programming.

Raghu is a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), and has received several awards, including a Distinguished Alumnus Award from IIT Madras, a Packard Foundation Fellowship, an NSF Presidential Young Investigator Award, and an ACM SIGMOD Contributions Award.