Last week I had the opportunity to attend the ICDE 2015 conference in Seoul and present our paper “Bump Hunting in the Dark – Discrepancy Maximization on Graphs“.

Our paper  To put it concisely, the paper discusses techniques to identify large areas of a graph that are dense in nodes that exhibit a particular property. Yes, it’s quite technical. You can take a look at the poster or  presentation, or even read the paper itself. We’ve also been invited to submit an extended version to TKDE.

The conference It was a nice conference, with quite a few people (about 600), including a few of the ‘big names’ from the database community. Michael Stonebraker, this year’s Turing Award winner, attended via Skype to discuss his 10-year paper award jointly received with Brown’s Ugur Çetintemel. His talk is available online, I found it a pleasure to watch.

The best paper award went to “Short Text Understanding Through Lexical-Semantic Analysis”, by Wen Hua et. al. It is an interesting choice, as it deviates a little from the core-database themes of the conference.

The city Seoul is a huge city that would require more than a week to see as a tourist. Thankfully I found some time to go around the city, try Korean food, and sit at a cafe or two. I was impressed by how clean the city is and how politely everyone treats you.