Prof. Arthur Keller
-------------------

Biographical:  Prof. Keller grew up in Flat Bush, NY -- noting that it was
interesting that he should go from there to Palo Alto, CA (Flat Bush vs.
Palo Alto (translation: Tall Tree)).  Undergrad: Brooklyn College. At
Stanford he was a PhD student from 1977 to 1985.  Various points in his
PhD student-life include: teaching CS105 and being Acting Assistant Chair
of the Department(note-worthy: He was still a student at the time). From
there he's taught at UT Austin and returned to Stanford in 1987.


Academic Past: Worked with Databases/Distributed Systems -- and on
TEX/LATEX with Prof. Don Knuth.  What Prof. Knuth had to say about him,
"Arthur is the person who has given me the most suggestions that I have
ever rejected -- and taken."


Academic Present: 

Key-words: Relational Databases, Data-Mining, E-commerce.
Key-concepts: Data webs: interlinking data.  Also being able to take a
model independent of the underlying data and dynamically hyperlinking
them.

Infomaster vs. Data warehouse vs. Middle-ware.
Data warehouses attempt to factor all of the data into a lowest common
denominator.  Middle-ware just attempts to be the plumbing to and from the
heterogenous sources.  Infomaster is source-centric, i.e. it is focused on
the individual data sources and attempts to harmonize them.


Life Lessons From Prof. Keller (paraphrased):

1) There's course work, and project work -- do more projects.
2) Get to know your professors, cultivate recommendations.
3) Great ideas, academically, don't always translate into great ideas,
commercially.
4) People build things.  Then other people often go use them for purposes
for which they were not designed.  
5) Cylinders must be drawn with an oval on top.


Contact Information:
ark@cs.stanford.edu
http://logic.stanford.edu/people/keller

also check out:
http://infomaster.stanford.edu