Mass Collaboration is a new "P2P"-style approach to large-scale knowledge sharing, with applications in customer support, focused community development, and capturing knowledge distributed across and within organizations. Effectively supporting this paradigm raises many technical challenges, spanning data management, search, notification, and intelligent match-making. Systems must be robust, self-tuning, and highly-distributed, and need to combine techniques from Database Systems and Information Retrieval. Mining massive amounts of data captured continually from user interactions offers the promise of increased business intelligence, and also improved user experiences, leading to increased participation and greater quality in the knowledge that is captured, both of which are central objectives in Mass Collaboration. In this talk, I will introduce Mass Collaboration and discuss some of the technical issues that it raises. I will present the approach taken at QUIQ, a company that provides Mass Collaboration solutions to companies such as Compaq, and discuss future directions for the field.

Tuesday, October 16 at 4pm in Duncan Hall 1064
A reception will precede the talk at 3:30 p.m. in DH 3092

About Raghu Ramakrishnan

Raghu Ramakrishnan is Professor of Computer Sciences and Vilas Associate at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Chairman and CTO of QUIQ, a company that is pioneering collaborative customer support. His research is in the area of database systems, in particular databases and information retrieval, data mining, and query optimization. He is editor-in-chief of the Journal of Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery, and co-director of the UW-Madison Data Mining Institute. Dr. Ramakrishnan is a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), and has received several awards, including a Packard Foundation Fellowship and an ACM SIGMOD Contributions Award. He has authored over 100 technical papers and written the widely-used text "Database Management Systems" (WCB/McGraw-Hill), now in its second edition (with J. Gehrke)