Speaker: Dr Margo Seltzer When: Friday, Jan 18th, 2008 Time: 2:00pm Where: ECS 243

Abstract:
As our scientific, business, and archival functions become increasingly dependent upon online data and processing, data provenance (or lineage) becomes increasingly important. Scientific disciplines rely on data provenance to validate their experimental results; archivists rely on provenance to prove or preserve an object's integrity; and businesses rely on provenance to adhere to government regulations. In this talk I will present an introduction to the problem of data provenance and how we are tackling the challenges by constructing storage systems that are aware of provenance, treat it as a first class storage object, and maintain and generate it automatically wherever possible.

Biography:
Margo I. Seltzer is a Herchel Smith Professor of Computer Science and a Harvard College Professor in the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. Her research interests include file systems, databases, and transaction processing systems. She is the author of several widely-used software packages including database and transaction libraries and the 4.4BSD log-structured file system. Dr. Seltzer is also a founder and CTO of Sleepycat Software, the makers of Berkeley DB. She is a Sloan Foundation Fellow in Computer Science, a Bunting Fellow, and was the recipient of the 1996 Radcliffe Junior Faculty Fellowship, the University of California Microelectronics Scholarship. She is recognized as an outstanding teacher and won the Phi Beta Kappa teaching award in 1996 and the Abrahmson Teaching Award in 1999. Dr. Seltzer received an A.B. degree in Applied Mathematics from Harvard/Radcliffe College in 1983 and a Ph. D. in Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1992.