ACM SIGMOD'08 New Researcher Symposium

10 June 2008, Tuesday
18:00 - 20:30
Salon A (Westin Bayshore Hotel, Vancouver)

The goal of this year's symposium is to give graduate students and junior researchers advice on various challenges involved in "switching careers". Mainly, we will focus on two different types of switches: switching from a grad student to an independent researcher/faculty member, and switching from industry to academia (and vice versa). Seven speakers organized in two panels will share perspectives on their personal experiences with switches at different points of their research careers. Although primarily targeting new researchers, we believe that these panels should be interesting for everyone in our community. The symposium is highly informal. So, we hope you come with any questions that you have been afraid to ask, and we promise to give you an answer. Everyone is welcome! 

Symposium Schedule

18:00 - 18:15 Welcome and Introduction (slides)

Ihab Ilyas (University of Waterloo)
Nesime Tatbul (ETH Zurich)

18:15 - 19:15
Panel I: From Grad School to Your Own Office: How to Create Your Independent Research Program

Lei Chen (Hong Kong University of Science and Technology) (slides)
Christoph Koch (Cornell University) (slides)
Mehul Shah (HP Labs) (slides)
Wang-Chiew Tan (University of California, Santa Cruz) (slides)

19:15 - 19:30
Break
19:30 - 20:30
Panel II: Between Industry and Academia: Challenges, Pros, and Cons

Alon Halevy (Google Inc.) (slides)
H V Jagadish (University of Michigan) (slides)
Raghu Ramakrishnan (Yahoo! Research)