Categories: GraphsKnowledgePresentationsResearch

QCon London 2013 – “A Platform for All That We Know”

A couple of weeks ago I attended QCon London 2013* where I had the pleasure of giving a version of my “A Platform for All That We Know” talk. I had to keep the talk on the abstract side since Qi Lu, our president, hadn’t yet talked about the “Bing Information Platform”.

My very good friend Jim Webber, Chief Scientist of Neo Technology, gave a great talk on “A little graph theory for the busy developer”. Jim’s presentation style is really out there: highly entertaining, interesting, and with substance. The room was PACKED. He has quite the following. I am so proud of him 🙂 He showed me the electronic feedback he received from the attendees immediately after the talk (a nice feature of QCon conferences). He got top marks from everyone. The talk will be available for everyone to watch in few months.

During his talk, Jim had some fun with the fact I work for Microsoft 🙂 He even used the Bing Is Not Google (BING) joke 🙂 I love him, so I don’t hold it against him. It’s all good fun 🙂 He also mentioned that I am an advocate of hypergraphs for graph stores, which is not the case. Since this relates to graph store design, I thought of sharing my thoughts on the subject. This short post sets the context 🙂

BTW… I made my slides available for download (PDF). The video of the talk will be available in few months on the QCon site.

* It was great hanging out with Web geek friends. Also, Barbara Liskov’s keynote on “The power of Abstraction” was awesome.

Savas Parastatidis

Savas Parastatidis works at Amazon as a Sr. Principal Engineer in Alexa AI'. Previously, he worked at Microsoft where he co-founded Cortana and led the effort as the team's architect. While at Microsoft, Savas also worked on distributed data storage and high-performance data processing technologies. He was involved in various e-Science projects while at Microsoft Research where he also investigated technologies related to knowledge representation & reasoning. Savas also worked on language understanding technologies at Facebook. Prior to joining Microsoft, Savas was a Principal Research Associate at Newcastle University where he undertook research in the areas of distributed, service-oriented computing and e-Science. He was also the Chief Software Architect at the North-East Regional e-Science Centre where he oversaw the architecture and the application of Web Services technologies for a number of large research projects. Savas worked as a Senior Software Engineer for Hewlett Packard where he co-lead the R&D effort for the industry's Web Service transactions service and protocol. You can find out more about Savas at https://savas.me/about