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Globalization Challenges to Database Community

Rajeev Rastogi

Executive Director

Bell Labs Research India

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Bell Labs Research India

Launched in October 2004

Focus: Computing & Communication Software

Low-Cost Networking

Network Monitoring

Data Analysis

Distributed Computing

3G Wireless Applications

Motivation:

Access to global talent

Access to global markets

- India, China: a third of world’s population

- New products to penetrate markets

Cost savings

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Impact, Challenges

Impact– High-end R&D jobs, better pay

• Reverse brain drain: many returning to avail opportunities back home

– Spreading research culture, should boost PhD enrollments• Internet enables research to be done from anywhere!

– New research challenges driven by needs of developing countries

Challenges– Recruiting

• Very few quality PhDs graduate each year from Indian universities

– Defining an independent research agenda

– Staying connected to US (email, netmeeting do help!)

– Coping with poor infrastructure: roads, traffic, power,….

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Does Globalization really require us to solve new (research) problems?My addresses in India

Bell Labs Research India,Lucent Technologies India Pvt Ltd.,Salarpuria Ascent 3rd Floor,No. 77, Jyoti Nivas College Road,Koramangala Industrial Layout,Ward No. 68,Bangalore - 560 095,Karnataka, India

Work

202 Vaswani Exotica,#3 Papanna Street,Off St. Marks Road,Bangalore: 560001,Karnataka, India

Home

Street name

State Zip

Country

US address format

My personal challenge: Getting these to fit into this

City

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So what else is different about India?

740 million people live in rural villages Low incomes: monthly per-capita income - $17.50 Low literacy: 60% Unreliable power: frequent outages Low teledensity: 1.5 phones per 100 people Low PC penetration Very few Internet users 22 official languages

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These lead to new research challenges….

Low-cost computing devices

Data access using cell phones

Low-cost networks

Data access over unreliable wireless meshes

User interfaces for illiterate people

Multi-lingual information storage, retrieval, and search

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Current low-cost PC efforts One Laptop Per Child (MIT Media Labs - $100 PC) Eduwise (Intel) Simputer (Picopeta)

Distinctive features Thin-clients (network computing),

open-source, low power displays

Widespread adoption?

Meanwhile… 100m mobile subscribers in India growing at 5m a month! 500m mobile subscribers in China growing at 6m a month! By 2010, 3.7b worldwide (1.5b 2.5G and above) cell phone subscribers! Cell phone costs coming down dramatically (< $50)

Could cell phones be the-low cost computing devices of the future?

* Source: Pyramid Research

Research Challenge 1: Low-Cost Computing Devices

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Research Challenge 2: Data Access using Cell Phones

Cell phones have many constraints Low bandwidth (few 10s or 100s of Kbps) On 2G phones, communication using SMS messages (max size: 160) Limited memory, battery

Possible solutions to conserve bandwidth:

Broadcasts [Imielinski etal, Acharya etal]

Query: Find dealer offering max price for wheat in neighboring villages

–Broadcast max price dealer in each village

–Compute max among neighbors on cell phone

Concise answers (e.g. Skylines)

Villages

Radio tower

Broadcast

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Research Challenge 3: Low-Cost Networks

Possible solution: 802.11 mesh networks [TIER, DGP]

– Low-cost due to competitive mass production

– Directional antennas for long-distance communication

Major challenge: Interference, need clever ways to

– Assign frequency channels

– Schedule link transmissions

Wireline & cellular technologies too expensive for Internet connectivity

Interference

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Research Challenge 4: Data Access over Unreliable Wireless Meshes

Data cache

Nodes are power-constrained, may be down due to unreliable power

Minimize communication to conserve power

– Cache items based on access patterns

– Batch queries, route results along steiner tree

Route around power outages to maximize throughput

– DTNs [Fall 03]

Data center

Data center

Data cache

Kiosk

Queries

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Research Challenge 5: User Interfaces for Illiterate People

Text-based interfaces do not work

Need to explore other interfaces

– Speech

– Visual (images, video)

Benefits

– Language independent, global

Challenges

– Voice based system needs to learn many accents and dialects

– Visual interfaces have limited vocabulary (compared to text)

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Research Challenge 6: Multi-lingual Storage, Retrieval, and Search

Native English speaking population on internet only 35%

Databases already support multi-lingual data using unicode

Challenge:

– Support search in many languages over content in many languages

Possible solution

– Translate search keywords to various languages and then search

Challenge

– Need search capability for non-English languages

– Translations (dictionary, phonetic) need to preserve meaning/intent