One buzzword that has been popular in the last couple of years is Big Data. In simplest terms, Big Data symbolizes the aspiration to build platforms and tools to ingest, store and analyze data that can be voluminous, diverse, and possibly fast changing. In this talk, I will try to reflect on a few of the technical problems presented by the exploration of Big Data. Some of these challenges in data analytics have been addressed by our community in the past in a more traditional relational database context but only with mixed results. We will review these quests and study some of the key lessons learned. At the same time, significant developments such as the emergence of cloud infrastructure and availability of data rich web services hold the potential for transforming our industry. We will discuss the unique opportunities they present for Big Data Analytics.

Surajit Chaudhuri is a Distinguished Scientist at Microsoft research. His current areas of interest are enterprise data analytics, self-manageability and multi-tenant technology for cloud database services. Surajit is an ACM Fellow, a recipient of the ACM SIGMOD Edgar F. Codd Innovations Award, ACM SIGMOD Contributions Award, a VLDB 10 year Best Paper Award and an IEEE Influential Paper Award. Surajit received his Ph.D. from Stanford University and B.Tech from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur.