Computer Sciences and Digital Technologies

Data Management: Expressiveness and Performance – Ioana Manolescu

Digital data constitutes a “second world”—that is, a representation, shaped by modeling choices, of a wide range of human activities, such as economics, communications, healthcare, and culture. Data is also created to describe the physical world, from the scale of the atom to that of organisms, oceans, continents, and galaxies. Since 1970, we have witnessed the rapid and intense development of models, algorithms, and systems that enable us to harness these vast volumes of data. Every citizen in a modern society uses databases on a daily basis—for payments, telecommunications, and health insurance—all of which stem from research in data management.

This research remains highly dynamic today; its progress is driven in turn by two factors. On the one hand, whenever a database management system (DBMS) achieves its objectives and can be used efficiently and simply, demand arises for it to process new types of data—richer and more complex—and processing them efficiently poses new scientific challenges. At the same time, success in data processing is defined primarily by speed, which in turn is determined by the hardware hosting the data and performing the computations. Thus, advances in computing hardware and networks lead to new software architectures for data processing and give rise to new algorithms. The rapid growth of digital data is driving the rise of new applications: we will discuss those in the fields of journalism, investigative reporting, and fact-checking.

Created in partnership with Inria, the Computer Sciences and Digital Technologies Annual Chair reflects a shared commitment to highlighting the importance of this scientific discipline and the need to grant it a full and integral role.