Abstract
Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Data Management (DM) emerged as distinct computer science disciplines about 6-7 decades ago, with DM playing a non-significant role in the first symbolic wave of AI, which relied on handcrafted knowledge in rule-based or expert systems. Big Data (BD) became a hot topic about two decades ago, initially driven by Web 2.0 (e-commerce and social media) companies, with technical, non-technical, and open-source factors fueling its rapid development. This BD wave, combined with hardware advances and AI algorithmic inventions, like neural networks, has fueled the major strides made in the second wave of AI. After a long dormancy, AI reemerged in the past decade, initially driven by Deep Learning (DL), which leveraged vast labeled data to train models faster with less human intervention. More recently, AI has surged with the rise of Large Language Models (LLMs), Generative AI (GenAI), and startups like Anthropic, DeepSeek, OpenAI, and xAI. Major vendors, including Alibaba, AWS, Google, IBM, Meta, and Nvidia, have pivoted their focus toward AI. In this talk, Prof. C. Mohan will survey historical developments, explore AI’s implications for DM, and provide a status report on the AI landscape across different regions.
About the speaker
Prof. C. Mohan is currently a Distinguished Professor of Science at Hong Kong Baptist University, a Distinguished Visiting Professor at Tsinghua University, and a member of the inaugural Board of Governors of Digital University Kerala. He retired in 2020 as an IBM Fellow at the IBM Almaden Research Center in Silicon Valley. He retired in 2020 as an IBM Fellow after 38.5 years at IBM Almaden Research Center, where he worked on database, blockchain, and AI technologies. He is known for inventing the ARIES family of database locking and recovery algorithms and the Presumed Abort distributed commit protocol. He is a Fellow of IBM (1997–2020), ACM, and IEEE, and served as IBM India Chief Scientist (2006–2009). Prof. C. Mohan received the ACM SIGMOD Edgar F. Codd Innovations Award and the VLDB 10 Year Best Paper Award and was elected to the U.S. and Indian National Academies of Engineering. He is also a Distinguished Alumnus of IIT Madras, received his PhD at the University of Texas at Austin, and holds 50 patents. During the last many years, he focused on Data, Cloud, Blockchain and AI technologies. He held visiting and consulting roles at the National University of Singapore, Google, and Microsoft, and has spoken in 43 countries.
