It is my pleasure to bring you the last
issue of the SIGMOD Record for year 2001. A main feature
of this issue is the special section on Data Mining for
Intrusion Detection and Threat Analysis. This section is
guest edited by Daniel Barbara. The section begins with
an introduction by the guest editor, followed by six
technical papers spanning a wide variety of topics,
ranging from building intrusion detection systems using
data mining to privacy of sensitive data and techniques
that prevent misuse of data mining techniques for
intrusion detection.
Another feature of this issue is the contributions
from three newly introduced sections: Book Reviews,
Career Forum, and Distinguished DB Profiles. The Book
Reviews section starts with an introduction by Karl
Aberer, followed by two reviews. The first book review
is written by Marc Scholl of University of Konstanz. It
discusses several interesting aspects of the textbook
written by Gerhard Weikum and Gottfried Vossen, titled
Transactional Information Systems: Theory, Algorithms,
and the Practice of Concurrency Control and Recovery.
The second review is contributed by H.V. Jagadish of
University of Michigan. The book is titled Information
Warfare and Security by Dorothy E. Denning. Jagadish
presents his review with a number of appealing and
personal touches.
The Career Forum section presents the first career
article on job search experiences. The article was
written by Ugur Cetintemel, who recently joined the CS
faculty at Brown University after receiving his Ph.D.
from University of Maryland. In addition, Alexandros
Labrinidis gives an overview of the objectives and call
for articles for Career Forum.
The Distinguished Database Profiles section reports
an interview with Professor Gio Wiederhold, contributed
by Marianne Winslett. Gio told several compelling
stories about his career, including his move into
academia in mid-career, his experience as a program
manager in a funding agency, and his belief of what
takes to be an effective consultant.
In addition to two workshop report articles, and
three contributions in the Influential Papers section,
this issue also includes an article by Luca Cardelli,
introducing a language for describing semi-structured
data. In the Standard section Jim Melton and Andrew
Eisenberg contributed an article on SQL Multimedia and
Application Packages, called SQL/MM. This issue also
includes an article in the industry perspective section,
which provides an overview of the SIGMOD 2001 industry
sessions, and an article in the Research Centers
section, featuring the ongoing research projects on
semantic information integration at the LSDIS lab in
University of Georgia. I would also like to share with
you an interesting article in the Systems and Prototypes
section. This article reviews the experiences of a
Berkeley team, led by Michael Franklin and Joseph
Hellerstein, in building the Telegraph Dataflow system.
In closing, I would like to thank the guest editor
Daniel Barbara for bringing our readers with this timely
and thought-provoking special topic section on intrusion
detection and threat analysis. I would also like to
thank the associate editors and the authors for their
contributions to this issue. I hope you enjoy reading
this issue.
