VLDB 2014 Best Paper Award

Professor Ooi Beng Chin and his team won the 2014 International Conference on Very Large Data Bases (VLDB) Best Paper Award.

The paper, entitled ‘epiC: an Extensible and Scalable System for Processing Big Data’, presents an extensible system, epiC, to tackle the ‘data variety’ challenge of Big Data.

epiC employs a general actor-like concurrent programming model (independent of the data processing models) for specifying parallel computations. Professor Ooi explained that while Hadoop/MapReduce has been widely used to process Big Data, it is essentially a query engine. As such, there has been much work done to extend its capabilities. epiC, on the other hand, is newly designed from scratch, and goes beyond querying to big data management and analytics.

The VLDB conference was held in the beginning of September in Hangzhou, China and is the premier annual international forum for data management and database researchers, vendors, practitioners, application developers, and users and covers issues in data management, databases and information systems research.