Method to the Madness
                                 Tim Kraska
                              Brown University
                                   Invited Talk


                                    Abstract
         Life, research, and an academic career have one thing in com-
     mon: they cannot be planned and always turn out differently than
     expected. At the same time, it does not mean that they have to
     be completely random. Using my past research as an example, I
     will outline how the wrong or right idea paired with random events
     lead to systems like CrowdDB, Tupleware, and now IDEA/Vizdom,
     and what I would do differently in retrospect. Furthermore, I will
     tell you my most important lessons learned over the course of now
     10 years in the research community.



Biography Tim Kraska is an Assistant Professor in the Computer Science depart-
ment at Brown University. Currently, his research focuses on Big Data management
systems for modern hardware and new types of workloads, especially interactive an-
alytics. Before joining Brown, Tim spent 3 years as a PostDoc in the AMPLab at
UC Berkeley, where he worked on hybrid human-machine database systems and cloud-
scale data management systems. Tim received his PhD from the ETH Zurich under
the supervision of Donald Kossmann. He was awarded an NSF Career Award (2015),
an Airforce Young Investigator Award (2015), a Swiss National Science Foundation
Prospective Researcher Fellowship (2010), a DAAD Scholarship (2006), a University
of Sydney Master of Information Technology Scholarship for outstanding achievement
(2005), the University of Sydney Siemens Prize (2005), two VLDB best demo awards
(2015 and 2011) and an ICDE best paper award (2013).