2^nd International Winter School on Big Data

Bilbao, Spain, February 8-12, 2016

Organized by

DeustoTech, University of Deusto
Rovira i Virgili University

Aims

BigDat 2016 will be a research training event for graduates and postgraduates in the first steps of their academic career. With a global scope, it aims at updating them about the most recent advances in the critical and fast developing area of big data, which covers a large spectrum of current exciting research and industrial innovation with an extraordinary potential for a huge impact on scientific discoveries, medicine, engineering, business models, and society itself. Renowned academics and industry pioneers will lecture and share their views with the audience.

Most big data subareas will be displayed, namely: foundations, infrastructure, management, search and mining, security and privacy, and applications. Main challenges of analytics, management and storage of big data will be identified through 4 keynote lectures, 18 six-hour courses, and one round table, which will tackle the most active and promising topics. The organizers believe outstanding speakers will attract the brightest and most motivated students. Interaction will be a main component of the event. An open session will give participants the opportunity to present their own work in progress in 5 minutes.

Addressed to

Graduate and postgraduates from around the world. There are no formal pre-requisites in terms of academic degrees. However, since there will be differences in the course levels, specific knowledge background may be assumed for some of them. BigDat 2016 is also appropriate for more senior people who want to keep themselves updated on recent developments and future trends. All will surely find it fruitful to listen and discuss with major researchers, industry leaders and innovators.

Regime

In addition to keynotes, at least 2 courses will run in parallel during the whole event. Participants will be able to freely choose the courses they will be willing to attend as well as to move from one to another.

Venue

BigDat 2016 will take place in Bilbao, famous for its gastronomy and the seat of the Guggenheim Museum. The venue will be:

DeustoTech, School of Engineering
University of Deusto
Avda. Universidades, 24
48014 Bilbao, Spain

Keynote Speakers

Nektarios Benekos (European Organization for Nuclear Research), Role of Computing and Software in Particle Physics

Chih-Jen Lin (National Taiwan University), When and When Not to Use Distributed Machine Learning

Jeffrey Ullman (Stanford University), Theory of MapReduce Algorithms

Alexandre Vaniachine (Argonne National Laboratory), Big Data Technologies and Data Science Methods in the Higgs Boson Discovery

Professors and Courses

• Nektarios Benekos (European Organization for Nuclear Research), [introductory/intermediate] Exploring the Mysteries of our Cosmos: the Big Deal between Big Data and Big Science
• Hendrik Blockeel (KU Leuven), [intermediate] Decision Trees for Big Data Analytics
• Nello Cristianini (University of Bristol), [introductory] THINKBIG: Towards Large Scale Computational Social Sciences, History and Digital Humanities
• Ernesto Damiani (University of Milan and EBTIC/Khalifa University), [introductory/intermediate] Architectures, Models and Tools for Big-Data-as-a-Service
• Francisco Herrera (University of Granada), [introductory] Big Data Preprocessing
• Chih-Jen Lin (National Taiwan University), [introductory/intermediate] Large-scale Linear Classification
• George Karypis (University of Minnesota), [intermediate/advanced] Scaling Up Recommender Systems
• Geoff McLachlan (University of Queensland), [intermediate/advanced] Big Data Extensions of Some Methods of Classification and Clustering
• Wladek Minor (University of Virginia), [introductory/intermediate] Big Data in Biomedical Sciences
• Raymond Ng (University of British Columbia), [introductory/intermediate] Mining and Summarizing Text Conversations
• Sankar K. Pal (Indian Statistical Institute), [introductory/advanced] Machine Intelligence and Granular Mining: Relevance to Big Data
• Erhard Rahm (University of Leipzig), [introductory/intermediate] Scalable and Privacy-preserving Data Integration
• Hanan Samet (University of Maryland), [introductory/intermediate] Sorting in Space: Multidimensional, Spatial, and Metric Data Structures for Applications in Spatial Databases, Geographic Information Systems (GIS), and Location-based Services
• Jaideep Srivastava (Qatar ComputingResearch Institute), [intermediate] Social Computing: Computing as an Integral Tool to Understanding Human Behavior and Solving Problems of Social Relevance
• Jeffrey Ullman (Stanford University), [introductory] Big Data Algorithms that Aren't Machine Learning
• Alexandre Vaniachine (Argonne National Laboratory), [introductory/advanced] Big Data: Comparison with Computational Models
• Xiaowei Xu (University of Arkansas, Little Rock), [introductory/advanced] Big Data Analytics for Social Networks
• Mohammed J. Zaki (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute), [introductory/intermediate] Large Scale Graph Analytics and Mining

Open Session

An open session will collect 5-minute presentations of work in progress by participants. They should submit a half-page abstract containing title, authors, and summary of the research to adrian.dediu (at) urv.cat by February 5, 2016.

Organizing Committee

• Adrian Horia Dediu (Tarragona)
• Carlos Martín-Vide (Tarragona, co-chair)
• Borja Sanz (Bilbao, co-chair)
• Florentina Lilica Voicu (Tarragona)

Registration

The registration form can be found here.

The selection of up to 8 courses requested in the registration template is only tentative and non-binding. For the sake of organization, it will be helpful to have an approximation of the respective demand for each course.

Since the capacity of the venue is limited, registration requests will be processed on a first come first served basis. The registration period will be closed and the on-line registration facility disabled when the capacity of the venue will be complete. It is much recommended to register prior to the event.

Deadlines and Fees

Participants are expected to attend full-time. Fees are a flat rate covering the attendance to all courses during the week. There are several early registration deadlines. Fees depend on the registration deadline:

• Early registration₁: August 26, 2015 --- 310 Euro
• Early registration₂: September 22, 2015 --- 340 Euro
• Early registration₃: October 19, 2015 -- 370 Euro
• Early registration₄: November 15, 2015 --- 400 Euro
• Early registration₅: December 12, 2015 --- 430 Euro
• Early registration₆: January 8, 2016 --- 460 Euro
• Regular registration: February 5, 2016 --- 490 Euro
• On-site registration: 520 Euro

Fees comprise access to all courses and lunches.

Certificate

Participants will be delivered a certificate of attendance.

Questions and further information

See contact information on the right-hand side of the page.

Acknowledgements

University of Deusto

La universitat pública de Tarragona

---