Jeffrey D. Ullman

Jeff Ullman is the Stanford W. Ascherman Professor of Computer Science (Emeritus). His interests include database theory, database integration, data mining, and education using the information infrastructure.

What's New

Generalizing Map-Reduce

Web-Mining Course

Book: Foundations of Computer Science

Dragon Book Finally Done

Gradiance

Gradiance has recently entered into an agreement with Pearson Education (Prentice-Hall and Addison-Wesley) to offer on-line homeworks in connection with many of the Pearson books in Computer Science and Engineering. The material for the Garcia-Ullman-Widom books is available now, but we are working on materials for a number of books in Databases, CS1/Java Automata, Compilers, Operating Systems, and Data Mining. In North America, Europe, Africa, and the Middle East, you should contact your Prentice-Hall or Addison-Wesley representative. Outside those areas, you can arrange for services directly from Gradiance (email to support at gradiance dt com) or through Pearson.

I Would Like to Hear From You, But...

Polemics

• Answers to All Questions Iranian. Am I the only one who gets peppered with questions from Iranians? They're technical questions or political questions, but there seems to be a system behind them. So I decided to save time and answer them all here.

• Fundamentalism. Shortly after 9/11/01, I wrote this article on fundamentalism --- the nonnegotiable belief in some unproven hypothesis. It's been added to periodically, and rambles a bit, over the foolishness of the Palestinian leadership, the drug warriors, the politically correct, the anti-abortion crowd, and a few others. This article also advocated research on a system like "Total Information Awareness," although I doubt that it had any influence on that development.

• 4-Way Stop Signs. Dumb traffic policies have always been way up on my list of things I'd like to fix but can't. The global problem is that those with the power to decide, focus on specific risks, which they can see. But in solving one problem, they often introduce far more harmful effects --- e.g., pollution. The problem is that the harm is distributed sufficiently widely so that no one can point to a particular death and attribute it to a particular instance of some dumb traffic policy. This polemic, originally written for Club Nexus (the prototype for Orkut), focuses on the 4-way stop signs on Stanford Campus, but the principles apply broadly.

• Attack of the Fifty Foot NIMBY's. Throughout my life, I've been infuriated by the tendency of our social structure to allow theft, as long as the loss is distributed in tiny parcels among a large number of people. "Affirmative action" is probably the best known of these subtle thefts, but this essay is not about affirmative action. Rather, it's about a theft that occurs on our streets every day, yet no one notices.

• Software Patents. This article was written for the Knuth Prize. Don, who is of course ineligible for the Knuth Prize, would probably say we should get rid of all patents. I don't agree, but I do feel that in the software area, things have gotten out of hand. Here, I tried to argue that courts should apply the same standards that are used when choosing papers worthy of presentation at a conference, to the matter of whether a certain software idea deserves a patent.

• University of California (Non)Confidentiality Policy. The UC system, unlike every other university in this country, refuses to offer the maximum confidentiality that the law allows for letters of recommendation that they solicit. Members of the various computer-science departments in the UC system understand that this policy makes letter-writing irrelevant and deprives them of an important source of advice. However, the policy comes from so high up that it is impossible for them to do anything about it. I have therefore endeavored to put in place a solution similar to that used in response to the equally foolish "Buckley amendment," which gave student applicants the right to see their recommendations. The document referred to is a pledge that the person about whom you are writing a letter can sign, to assure you that you can write an honest and frank letter without fear of later reprisal or embarrassment. I wish the UC departments would themselves solicit this pledge, in order to preserve your anonymity as well as your privacy, but apparently they are forbidden to do so.

Books --- Past and Future

Biographical Information

• A brief biography

• A listing of all publications