Report author:
Event organiser(s):
Title of event:
Date of event:
Target Audience:
James Cheney
James Cheney
Workshop on Provenance in Software Systems
March 30-April 3, 2009
Non-specialist professionals: please define any acronyms specific to your field of study.
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● to familiarize researchers working on the above topics with possible applications in provenance, scientific data management and other areas to encourage new work on such applications and to seek common foundations underlying the above topics and provenance research in other areas, perhaps yielding a general definition or theory of "provenance".
The first day consisted of talks by the invited speakers. Unfortunately several of the invited speakers dropped out, including one that encountered travel problems at the last minute.
• Christian Skalka (University of Vermont) Data Provenance in Automated Remote Environmental
Monitoring
• Perdita Stevens (University of Edinburgh) Traceability in (bidirectional) model transformations
• Stijn Vansummeren (University of Hasselt) On the expressive power of provenance in database queries
• Nate Foster (University of Pennsylvania) Bidirectional Programming Languages
• Steve Chong (Harvard University) Semantics for Provenance Security
• Jeffrey Vaughan (University of Pennsylvania) Evidence-based Audit
The second through fifth days were loosely structured into breakout sessions:
• One group (Chong, Vaughan, and Skalka) met to discuss provenance and watermarking for sensor networks
• Another group (Buneman, Cheney, Vansummeren) discussed techniques for integrating provenance in database and workflow systems (a long-running interest area for them)
• Vansummeren, Stevens and Foster met to discuss bidirectional programming and provenance
These discussions merged and overlapped in the usual way during a collaborative meeting.
We took advantage of the good weather on Thursday and Friday to organizing brief excursions to
Arthur's Seat and Edinburgh Castle.
In the opinion of the theme leader (and author of this report), the meeting was a complete success, mitigated only by the absence of several key researchers we invited but who could not make it after all
(Hicks, Corcoran, Acar, Ahmed). All three of the above objectives were achieved, and the participants made the following remarks in support of this event:
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“Accommodations, facilities, etc. were all excellent.”
“I thought the public talks were great, and the "extra" talks we had on subsequent days were also good, as a way to focus conversation. “
“I had a great time, and very much enjoyed meeting and talking to the other participants. ”
“Thank you so much for organizing the symposium, it was both highly productive and very fun... Small group collaborations worked really well, as did the talks on the first day.”
“I had a GREAT time last week with lots of interesting discussions. I learned a great deal. In my opinion, the organisation was virtually flawless. Contrasting with the "Provenance in databases" symposium, I especially like that the public workshop was held on the first day. This certainly provided the right context, giving us all a feel what each person was working on, and allowing for the discussions later in the week. Also, the stimulus to work in smaller groups proved to be very efficient from my point of view. (Large group discussions tend to become chaotic in general.)”
We expect future collaborations between the theme leaders and participants, and there has already been interest in writing a brief event report for SIGPLAN Notices or another suitable publication.
We asked for feedback specifically about the collaborative part of the week:
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“...anything that could focus efforts on particular topics to get better productivity would be good.
Honestly, I'm not sure what could have been done in our case, since people are coming with such different background and agendas, but I'm just saying.”
“In the future it might be good to start each "collaboration day" with a short talk or set of talks
(maybe 15 minutes each?) which could be about work in progress, new ideas for collaboration, or simply cool topics relevant to the workshop. I think this might help provide a little, useful structure to the day.”
“Allowing for slightly more downtime during the days (or evenings) would be good.”
“I think slightly more structure on Tuesday morning would have been useful, something like 10 minutes for each person to talk about where they wanted to head with provenance/what they think are the important current problems in provenance. I think that this may have given the breakout groups a little more structure and form. Related to that, it surprised me how little time there seemed to be to work in the small break-out groups. I'm not sure how to address this, but it seemed that the week flew by, and I would have enjoyed more time to work in small groups.“
“I would have liked to had more time for technical discussions (like we did on the last day) but I can't really point to anything in the organization that would have made time for more--we were a somewhat diverse group, and time was tight.”
We plan to take these concerns into account in organizing the last theme event.
Skalka provided a few pictures of the outings on Thursday and Friday afternoon:
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