Content: Most structured data today is relational, and SQL remains the dominant query language to access data. Several recent papers have questioned many of SQL's core design decisions. In this seminar, we investigate the design space of relational query languages: We study the core relational query languages, read recent alternative proposals, tease out their common abstractions, try to create a new phenomenology of relational languages, and ask: what are the "right" abstractions for relational query languages, especially as we are moving towards natural-language interfaces.
Prerequisites: The course is fast-paced but self-contained. Standard undergraduate CS knowledge of algorithms, logic and complexity theory (e.g., from textbooks such as [Ericson'19], [Dasgupta, Papadimitriou, Vazirani'06], [Cormen, Leiserson, Rivest, Stein'09], [Kleinberg, Tardos'05], or [Lehman, Leighton, and Meyer'15]) will be helpful.
PhD program: The seminar counts for the PhD breath requirement in "Software".
Time/location
Instructor: Wolfgang Gatterbauer
Contact: Please use Piazza (via direct access from within Canvas) for all questions related to lectures, coursework, and the project. Notice you can post questions anonymously to all other students, or anonymously even to the instructors. Alternatively, please use my anonymous feedback form to send comments and suggestions that only I can see.
50%: Course project: The main component of this course will be a research project in the latter part of this seminar. The project should be vaguely inspired by the topic of this seminar (relational languages and how humans and machines interact with data, today or in the future), yet is completely flexible and allows students to explore ideas related to their existing PhD research. This will involve ungraded initial and intermediate project proposals, and a project presentation and final report. The final report should resemble a small workshop paper and - as stretch goal - should have the potential to be extended to a full paper. Guidance on the project and preliminary dates are posted on the project page.
15%: Paper presentation in PART 2: You choose a paper from the suggested list (or add another paper you are interested in, just talk to me) by posting your choice of the paper on Piazza (first post, first choice). You present the paper in class and prepare an interactive discussion. I highly recommend that you prepare your presentation in PowerPoint (Office 365) and share your initial draft of your slides a few days before your presentation slot. I will make a pass and add suggestions and questions. That way you are prepared upfront for some of the questions :). Goal is to make the session as informative for everyone as possible by drilling down one a few interesting aspects of each paper.
15%: Mini projects: Students "illustrate" 3 lectures of their own choice with mini projects that independently explore some side issues motivated by the topics covered in class and their own questions. Graduate theory classes often ask students to scribe the lecture content. However, we change the rule of the game. Rather than scribing (= repeating and summarizing) the content of the class, I ask you to "illustrate" some interesting aspect in the covered topics with imaginative and ideally tricky illustrating examples. Those illustrations are great if they in turn can help other students practice and solidify their understanding of the topics discussed. Please start either from our PPTX template or use your own template (as long as you include slide numbers), and submit it as PDF to Canvas, naming it "cs7575-sp26-[YOUR NAME]-scribe[NUMBER]-[SOME DESCRIPTIVE TITLE].PDF".
Justification: Georg Cantor is quoted as saying: "To ask the right question is harder than to answer it." In that spirit, our class scribes are closer to research than assignments: What particular aspect in a class is worthy to be "illustrated"? That's already part of the question. Scribes are done in PowerPoint and are due 1 week after class at midnight (Mon for Mon classes, Wed for Wed classes). For some more pedagogic motivation see videos by Tim Brown on asking questions and reframing problems being key to creativity, Dan Meyer on formulating problem being more important than just solving them, Derek Muller on increasing learning by including possible misconceptions into stories, a blog post on example-based reasoning, and an older text of mine of the educational value of temporarily misleading the spectator before giving the correct answer.
Procedure:
20%: Class participation: Classes will be interactive and require concentration and participation of the students. I am a big fan of the Socratic Method (please watch this 1:30min video clip from the 1973 movie "The Paper Chase" to see what we as teachers should strive for). Participate when we discuss the merits or shortcomings of algorithms, or when we have small group break-out sessions with exercises. Ask questions, during class or on Piazza. Questions that make me ponder or make me create new illustrating examples are all great examples of class participation. Also, *never* hesitate to point out to me any errors you spot in the slides, even if minor. You can also post anonymously to the other students on Piazza (and even anonymously to the instructor via the anonymous feedback form, though then I would not be able to associate you with your greatly appreciated participation). Also, don't hesitate to point out to me any interesting links to interesting related material. It can only count towards class participation. Finally notice that while the class provides extensive readings for those interested, these pointers are almost exclusively optional (unless otherwise stated in class).
The topic of this seminar is to the best of my knowledge new. If you know of a related course or seminar, please let me know (for example via the anonymous feedback form). The pedagogy of this class is inspired by 7240: Principles of scalable data management and 7840: Foundations and Applications of Information Theory.