Distinguished Profiles: Dan Suciu Speaks Out on Research, Shyness and Being a Scientist
Distinguished Profiles: Dan Suciu Speaks Out on Research, Shyness and Being a Scientist, from SIGMOD Record, Dec 2017.
One thing I always enjoy in SIGMOD Record is interviews to great database scientists. This volume is special to me because I entered the database research field by reading papers from his group. Dan Suciu has been studying XML, which is a data format that has a semi-structured data model, and non-relational query languages, such as XPath, XQuery, were invented around that time. His research papers around type-checking of XML transformations and the equivalence of XPath queries were chosen as the Test of Time Awards in PODS.
There was an interesting question on growing students:
Q: Three of your Ph.D. students have been runners-up or recipients of the ACM SIGMOD Dissertation Award. I want to know how you make that happen!
His answer was intriguing:
A: I want to know too! I was just lucky to work with very talented people. Some of my current students are equally talented, so I just feel lucky to have them and look forward to working with more people like them. I really don’t have a recipe. I think it’s just a matter of finding the right people.
Great researchers are alway surrounded by great students. Once I asked the same question to another established professor, and he also said the same thing; students write papers without telling them to do so. No supervision is necessary if you have students with great ambition.
He also mentioned about the importance of publishing a paper:
When you have a paper that you really care about, then you are really eager to tell the world about it.
The adviser’s job is to help students to publish a paper that he/she really care about. When the students go outside to explain the value of their research, they will often find their pitch doesn’t work:
So then they need to adjust it and try again with the next person to explain their research. So, it’s a very important experience to try to advertise your own work to other people and find the best way to describe it.
He also gave an important advice for researchers pursing publishing papers in top conferences like SIGMOD and PODS:
Rejections from SIGMOD and PODS don’t mean that your work is lousy, it perhaps means that your work is ahead of its time. Eventually, good work will be published, and then it will be much better recognized if you stuck with your ideas despite the fact that the community had a difficult time accepting those ideas.
Keep working, and stick with what you believe valuable.
An interesting remark on what he wants to do if he have extra time was:
Ah, I would hack.
Yes! We do need a good combination of both theory and practice, as he mentioned in this interview.
SIGMOD Record is an interesting resource for finding recent trends and opinions of database researchers:
