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Talk Title:
Ultorg: A General-Purpose User Interface for Relational Databases
Talk Abstract:
The relational database is now 50 years old, yet remains primarily a tool for programmers. Its place is in the bottom of the software stack, serving as a general-purpose storage back-end for any kind of structured, domain-specific data: warehouse inventory, academic course catalogs, campaign finance reports, experimental results, and so on. On the front-end side, a relational database provides little help; for every new business domain, a programmer must be hired to write a specialized user interface. This is extremely expensive, and leaves relational database technology out of reach for many people, projects, and organizations.In this talk, I propose a solution: A single, general-purpose user interface that non-programmers can use to interact with arbitrary relational databases. The system, originally developed as a PhD project at MIT CSAIL, is a hybrid spreadsheet/database interface designed to generalize the "boring" data displays that are seen in traditional tailor-made database applications ("CRUD" applications). Using a small set of spreadsheet-like operations, the user can quickly produce the visual equivalent of any SQL-92 query, visualizations such as crosstabs, calendars, bar charts, and Kanban boards, as well as non-tabular multi-query visualizations such as forms, dashboards, and hierarchical reports. Application areas can be found in all manner of organizations: corporations, non-profits, higher education, science, healthcare, journalism, disaster response, public administration, and so on.This talk includes work published at CHI 2011, InfoVis 2013, and SIGMOD 2016.
Guest Speaker: Eirik Bakke, Founder, Ultorg
Speaker Bio:
Eirik Bakke is the founder and CEO of Ultorg LLC. Ultorg is the commercial successor to the SIEUFERD project at MIT CSAIL, which Eirik built as a grad student in the years 2008-2016, advised by David Karger. Currently, Eirik serves as Principal Investigator on an NSF Small Business Innovation Research grant. Eirik holds MS and PhD degrees from MIT and a BSE from Princeton University. Before fleeing to the US in 2004, Eirik evaded military service by spending a year as an end-user of an aquatically themed database application made specifically for the administration of public Norwegian music schools.
