18th HASLab Infoblender Seminar

Date: February, 17
Venue: Braga, INESC TEC's Pole (Lounge, 4th floor of DI, Building 07)              
              Coffee Session: 1.30 pm to 2.00 pm
              Talk Session: 2.00 pm to 3.00 pm

Title: "Towards a Linear Algebra Semantics for SQL"
Speaker: By Prof. José Nuno Oliveira, HASLab/INESC TEC & University of Minho

Abstract:
In the 1990s, J. Gray (et al.) wrote: "[...] expressing roll-up, and cross-tab queries with conventional SQL is daunting. [...] GROUP BY is an unusual relational operator [...]". E.Codd also
expressed similar concerns: "[...] relational DBMS were never intended to provide [...] for data [...] consolidation [in] multi-dimensional data analysis". In this talk, these remarks are taken
as motivation for proposing (typed) linear algebra as theoretical framework able to smoothly accommodate the quantitative and qualitative aspects of SQL semantics, in a unified way,
amenable to interpreting SQL queries in a distributed, map-reduce style.

Keywords: Software Engineering, SQL, Formal Semantics, Linear Algebra of Programming.

Speaker:
José Nuno Oliveira is a full professor at the Informatics Department of the University of Minho and a senior research member at HASLab/INESC TEC and Univ. of Minho. He graduated in
electrical engineering from the Univ. of Porto and received the MSc and PhD degrees in computer science from the Univ. of Manchester, UK. Prof. Oliveira's main research interests are
formal methods, algebra of programming, and functional programming. The proposed talk can be framed in his efforts to develop a linear algebra of programming applicable to quantitative
formal methods in software engineering. Prof. Oliveira served on the PC of almost 50 conferences and workshops in his field of study and co-chaired some of them. He is also a member of
IFIP WG2.1 and of the FME association.

If you have any question please contact: haslab.comunicacao@gmail.com