A.M. Turing Award

Michael Stonebraker, Pioneer in Database Systems Architecture, Receives 2014 ACM Turing Award 

Michael Stonebracker is being recognized for fundamental contributions to the concepts and practices underlying modern database systems. Stonebraker is the inventor of many concepts that were crucial to making databases a reality and that are used in almost all modern database systems. His work on INGRES introduced the notion of query modification, used for integrity constraints and views. 

His later work on Postgres introduced the object-relational model, effectively merging databases with abstract data types while keeping the database separate from the programming language.

Stonebraker's implementations of INGRES and Postgres demonstrated how to engineer database systems that support these concepts; he released these systems as open software, which allowed their widespread adoption and their code bases have been incorporated into many modern database systems. 

Since the pathbreaking work on INGRES and Postgres, Stonebraker has continued to be a thought leader in the database community and has had a number of other influential ideas including implementation techniques for column stores and scientific databases and for supporting on-line transaction processing and stream processing.

For more info click here

http://amturing.acm.org/stonebraker_1172121.pdf

Can computers be creative?

World's first fictional ideation machine

The project acronym stands for the What-If Machine. It is also the name of the world's first fictional 'ideation' (creative process of generating, developing, and communicating new ideas) software, developed within the project. The software generates fictional mini-narratives or storylines, using natural language processing techniques and a database of facts mined from the web (as a repository of 'true' facts). The software then inverts or twists the facts to create 'what-ifs'. The result is often incongruous, 'What if there was a woman who woke up in an alley as a cat, but could still ride a bicycle?'

Can computers judge creativity?

WHIM is more than just an idea-generating machine. The software also seeks to assess the potential for use or quality of the ideas generated. Since the ideas generated are ultimately destined for human consumption, direct human input was asked for in crowd sourcing experiments. For example, WHIM researchers asked people whether they thought the 'what-ifs' were novel and had good narrative potential, and also asked them to leave general feedback. Through machine learning techniques, devised by researchers at the Jozef Stefan Institute in Ljubljana, the system gradually gains a more refined understanding of people's preferences.


Just the beginning

Generating fictional mini-narratives is just one aspect of the project. Researchers at the Universidad Complutense Madrid are expanding the mini-narratives into full narratives that could be more suitable for the complete plot of a film, for example. Meanwhile, researchers at the University College in Dublin are trying to teach computers to produce metaphorical insights and ironies by inverting and contrasting stereotypes harvested from the web, while researchers from the University of Cambridge are looking into web mining for ideation purposes. All of this work should lead to better and more complete fictional ideas.

More than a whim

While the fictional ideas generated may be whimsical, WHIM is based on solid science. It is part of the emerging field of computational creativity, a fascinating interdisciplinary discipline located at the intersection of artificial intelligence, cognitive psychology, philosophy, and the arts.

References:
 http://phys.org/news/2015-07-creative.html#jCp