Playing Games with Data Management

Johannes Gehrke
Cornell University and Max Planck Institute for Software Systems
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Databases have the stigma of an association with (boring) enterprise data management. The area of database research, however, has developed a wide set of concepts and techniques with applicability much beyond exam questions about departments and employees. In this talk, I will show how the idea of declarative processing from databases can be applied to computer games. I will describe our journey from declarative to imperative scripting languages for computer games and simulations, and I will introduce the state-effect pattern, a design pattern that enables developers to design games and simulations that can be programmed imperatively, but processed declaratively.

Brief Bio:

Johannes Gehrke is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Cornell University. Johannes' research interests are in the areas of database systems and data mining. Johannes has received a National Science Foundation Career Award, an Arthur P. Sloan Fellowship, a Humboldt Research Award, and an IEEE Computer Society Technical Achievement Award. He co-authored the undergraduate textbook Database Management Systems (McGrawHill (2002), currently in its third edition), used at universities all over the world. From 2007 to 2008, he was Chief Scientist at FAST, A Microsoft Subsidiary. Johannes is also an Adjunct Faculty at the University of Tromsų in Norway, and he is currently a visiting researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems in Germany.