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.
