2009 SIGMOD Programming Contest

Massachusetts Institute Of Technology, Cambridge MA

Investigators

Abstract

This grant funds an NSF-funded programming contest for students in the Database Management Systems (DBMS) area at the ACM SIGMOD 2009 conference. Student teams from degree-granting institutions will compete in a programming task selected by a committee of DBMS experts, including the principal investigators. The topic chosen would be exciting to students, non-trivial to accomplish, and would have research potential. The goals of the contest are to: a) Stimulate student interest in the DBMS field b) Present a research challenge c) Foster the creation of sharable open source code modules d) Foster Computer Science education by creating a forum in which students can excel e) Present a forum in which excellent students can get noticed, other than by writing papers. The contest would be conducted during early 2009, with a bakeoff among the finalists at the SIGMOD conference. A substantial prize (approximately $5,000), donated by a DBMS company, will be awarded to the winning team. In addition, a conference speaking slot will give visibility to the winner. For more information visit the contest web site, http://db.csail.mit.edu/sigmod09contest/. The grant is used to support the creation of the necessary infrastructure (test harness, test data, etc.) for the contest and for travel grants for the contest finalists. If successful in year 1, the principal investigators would make this an annual contest.