• Register here as a student
• Register here as a regular

Speakers and topics

• Talk #1: Architecting the Snowflake Data Cloud
  Allison Lee has spent the last two decades building commercial database systems. She is a founding engineer at Snowflake and contributed to many of its foundational components, including the query optimizer, metadata management, language extensibility, and data protection. She currently leads the database engineering team.
• Talk #2: What Goes Around Comes Around... And Around…
  Andy Pavlo is an Associate Professor with Indefinite Tenure of Databaseology in the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon University. He knows some pile about databases, and is well known for leading research on self-driving databases and his engaging online lectures.
• Talk #3: Leaving The Two Tier Architecture Behind
  Hannes Mühleisen is a creator of the DuckDB database system and Co-founder and CEO of DuckDB Labs. Hannes is also Professor of Data Engineering at Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen and a senior researcher at the CWI Database Architectures Group. His main interest are - shockingly - analytical data management systems.
• Talk #4: What Table Representation Learning Brings to Data Systems
  Madelon Hulsebos is a tenure track researcher at CWI in Amsterdam, currently focusing on Table Representation Learning to democratize insights from structured data. She was awarded a BIDS-Accenture fellowship for her postdoctoral research on retrieval systems for structured data at UC Berkeley as well as a 5-year AiNed fellowship grant
• Talk #5: The Future Of Cloud Database Systems
  Viktor Leis is a Professor at the Technical University of Munich (TUM), and he has worked on systems such as Hyper, Umbra and LeanStore. His research focuses on designing cost-efficient data systems for the cloud.
• Laudatio for Marcin Żukowski
  Peter Boncz leads the Database Architectures research group at CWI, and is professor at VU Amsterdam. He has worked on various database systems including MonetDB, VectorWise, Databricks and MotherDuck. He was the thesis advisor of Marcin Żukowski at CWI and co-founded VectorWise with him.
• Dijkstra Fellow Talk: The importance of product
  Marcin Żukowski is a computer scientist and entrepreneur, known for co-founding the high-performance analytical database company, Snowflake, and for his work on vectorized query execution during his PhD at CWI. He is in town because the day before this meetup he will receive the Dijkstra Fellowship.

Tentative programme

• Time: 09:30-10:15
• Walk-in and registration: 10:15-10:30
• Welcome: 10:30-11:15
• Lecture: 11:15-12:00
• Lecture: 12:00-13:00
• Lunch: 13:00-13:45
• Lecture: 13:45-14:30
• Lecture: 14:30-15:00
• Coffee break: 15:00-15:45
• Lecture: 15:45-16:30
• Laudatio by Peter Boncz & Dijkstra fellow Marcin Żukowski: 16:30-17:30
• Drinks!

Dijkstra Fellowship 2024 for Marcin Żukowski
Marcin Żukowski, a CWI alumnus, pioneered vectorized execution during his PhD, winning the DaMoN 2007 Best Paper Award and CIDR 2024 Test of Time Award. He co-founded VectorWise (now Actian), which set the standard for modern analytics databases, and later launched Snowflake in Silicon Valley, introducing the first truly cloud-native data warehousing service. Snowflake’s key innovations, like elastic scalability and separation of storage and computation, trace back to Żukowski’s research. Now active as an advisor and academic mentor, Żukowski exemplifies how foundational research can drive transformative technologies, inspiring future technology leaders.

CWI Lectures combined with Dijkstra Fellowship award
Topics of the CWI lectures are related to the architecture of data processing and analysis systems.