Publications

SAP NetWeaver BI Accelerator
SAP Press Essentials 42
(est pub November 2008)
Approx 250 pages

This SAP PRESS Essentials book is your A-to-Z guide to understanding, setting up, and operating the SAP NetWeaver BI Accelerator. After explaining the high-level concept of the BI accelerator and reviewing its architecture, the author provides detailed advice on all administrative tasks such as: setting up the RFC connection, building and maintaining the indexes, cloning the software onto new blades, updating the TREX engine, and much more. A substantial chapter is dedicated to advanced administration and should boost your confidence if you need to repair the RFC connection, reorganize the index landscape, check and rebuild indexes, or collaborate with SAP experts. A further chapter looks at future developments and success stories, and a final technical chapter introduces the novel technology behind the accelerator.

Reducing Outer Joins
(with Gerhard Hill)
VLDB Journal: The International Journal on Very Large Data Bases
DOI 10.1007/s00778-008-0110-5
Personal preprint:
PDF: 11 pages, 138 KB

Abstract. We present a method for transforming some outer joins to inner joins and describe a generalized semijoin reduction technique. The first part of the paper shows how to transform a given outer join query whose join graph is a tree to an equivalent inner join query. The method uses derived relations and join predicates. Derived relations contain columns corresponding to join conditions and may have virtual row identifiers, rows and attribute values. The constructed inner join query, after elimination of virtual row identifiers, has the same join tuples as the outer join query. Both the theoretical maximum number of virtual rows and the average number in practice are shown to be low. The method confines consideration of the non-associativity of outer joins to a single step. The second part of the paper generalizes to outer joins the well known technique of semijoin reduction of inner joins. It does so by defining the notions of influencing and needing, and using them to define full reduction and reduction plans. The technique is applied here to perform one step of the method presented in the first part. Semijoin reduction is useful in practice for executing join queries in distributed databases.

Hitting on Consciousness
Honderich Versus McGinn
JCS 15(1), 109-128 (2008)
PDF: 20 pages, 125 KB

Ted Honderich, 74, formerly Grote Professor of the Philosophy of Mind and Logic at the University of London, recently published a short book on consciousness (Honderich, 2004). Colin McGinn, 57, his former colleague at University College London and now a professor of philosophy at the University of Miami, Florida, reviewed it (McGinn, 2007a). The review is quite long and detailed, but the first sentences set the tone. ...

Der Einfluss der Datenverteilung auf die Performanz eines Data Warehouse
(mit T. Legler, W. Lehner)
12. Fachtagung Datenbanksysteme für Business, Technologie und Web, Aachen (2007)
PDF: 12 pages, 63 KB

Abstract: Dieses Papier befasst sich mit einer Studie über die Optimierungsmöglichkeiten von Anfragen auf verteilten DW-Architekturen mittels verschiedenartiger Verteilungsstrategien der beteiligten Tabellen am Beispiel SAP NetWeaver BI.

God and Sam Harris
February 2007
PDF: 36 pages, 251 KB

Abstract: Popular discussions of religion are often dismayingly bereft of logical rigour or scientific clarity, but the recent attack on organised religion spearheaded by Sam Harris has ignited a radical debate that sets new standards of quality. I offer my own logical and scientific perspective on the main points.

Will Robots See Humans as Dinosaurs?
JCS 13(12), 97-104 (2006)
PDF: 8 pages, 387 KB

The JCS report on the ASSC10 conference at St Anne’s College, Oxford, in June 2006, by Claude Pasquini (2006) was delightfully evocative of a delightful conference. But I was startled to read this dramatic paragraph ...

Data Mining with the SAP NetWeaver BI Accelerator
(with T. Legler, W. Lehner)
Proceedings VLDB 2006
PDF: 10 pages, 543 KB

Abstract. The new SAP NetWeaver Business Intelligence Accelerator is an engine that supports online analytical processing. It performs aggregation in memory and in query runtime over large volumes of structured data. This paper first briefly describes the accelerator and its main architectural features, and cites test results that indicate its power. Then it describes in detail how the accelerator may be used for data mining. The accelerator can perform data mining in the same large repositories of data and using the same compact index structures that it uses for analytical processing. A first such implementation of data mining is described and the results of a performance evaluation are presented. Association rule mining in a distributed architecture was implemented with a variant of the BUC iceberg cubing algorithm. Test results suggest that useful online mining should be possible with wait times of less than 60 seconds on business data that has not been preprocessed.

Omniscience
Life, the Universe and Everything
September 2006
PDF: 24 slides, 171 KB

Blinded by the Light
Response to de Quincey
JCS 13(4), 32-33 (2006)
PDF: 1 page, 68 KB

Christian de Quincey sees light as a metaphor for consciousness. He posits a scale of consciousness running from total darkness to cosmic enlightenment. ...

About Time
January 2006
PDF: 16 pages, 175 KB

Abstract. This essay is an exercise in scientific metaphysics. Its aim is to sketch a unified account of time that both works in modern physics and makes sense in psychology. The raw materials for the sketch come from elementary logic and set theory. The experience of time flow is seen as a direct manifestation of a fundamental physical process. The ontology and epistemology of this experience can provide a foundation for psychology. If the physical sciences in their present form depict "the view from nowhere" onto reality, the new foundation can depict the view from anywhere.

Speed, Scalability and Flexibility All at Once
SAP Insider, 4 (2005)
PDF: 4 pages, 583 KB

SAP NetWeaver 2004s Business Intelligence (BI) is faster than ever before, accelerated by a massively boosted capability for high performance analytics (HPA) humming behind the familiar BI frontends. ...

Roads to Reality
Penrose and Wolfram Compared
JCS 12(2), 78-83 (2005)
PDF: 6 pages, 65 KB

Sir Roger Penrose, retired professor of mathematics at the University of Oxford and collaborator with Stephen Hawking on black hole theory, has written 'a complete guide to the laws of the universe' called The Road to Reality. ...

Mindworlds
Consciousness and Related Studies
Ross (2004)
PDF: 348 pages, 2 MB

Consciousness is hard to understand. The ongoing attempt to understand it is perhaps the central scientific challenge of our time. The 1990s were dubbed the Decade of the Brain, and we made huge advances, but the core mystery of consciousness remains. As a young student of scientific philosophy, I had a lot of deep ideas about how the mind related to reality but lacked the patience to follow them through. Despairing of the glacial tempo of academic life and the pompous
opacity of its rituals, I chose to cut loose for a while and decided fiction was a valid vehicle for thinking out loud. Over the last decade, I have learned to appreciate anew the value of more method in the scientific study of consciousness. This book is primarily a presentation of work in progress, but also a log of my return to science.

Purpose in Life and Science
The Power of Purpose Awards
May 2004
PDF: 4 pages, 110 KB

As I look at my face in the bathroom mirror, I see an uneven pulp of ageing flesh around two beady eyes. My stare becomes hypnotic and the flesh seems to melt. I see a spectral zombie face shimmering behind two black holes. The holes glaze over and I get dizzy. Who am I, where is this, why does it go on? ...

Business at the Speed of Evolution
Internal Auditing and Business Risk 27(12), 12 (2003)
PDF: 1 page, 64 KB

If internal auditors and chief executives only assess IT projects by their impact on the bottom line, they are missing the point. Andy Ross explains how a new world view is needed to see the full picture.

The Self: From Soul to Brain
A New York Academy of Sciences Conference
JCS 10(2), 67-85 (2003)
PDF: 19 pages, 104 KB

The Mount Sinai School of Medicine is an imposing monument to the wealth and power of scientific medicine. Set on its own block in upper Manhattan, its rhetorical centre is the Stern Auditorium. Here, just over a year after 9/11, a group of gurus and self-seekers assembled to confer on the nature of the self. I was there too, looking for help in constructing a grand unified theory of soul and brain. ...

A Photonic Theory of Consciousness
Prague, Czech Republic, July 2003
PDF: 60 slides, 3.3 MB

First-Person Consciousness
Honderich and McGinn Reviewed
JCS 9(7), 55-82 (2002)
PDF: 28 pages, 191 KB

A nice everyday conception of consciousness is as autobiography. Ongoing experience is stored and restructured as a personal narrative, and consciousness is the generic mental state that accompanies this lifelong cognitive activity. On the higher scale of human cultural achievement, the literary form of autobiography brings this form of consciousness to a natural zenith. From this perspective, it is a happy coincidence that two distinguished philosophers of consciousness have recently published philosophical autobiographies. ...

Mindworlds
How Set Theory and Quantum Physics Can Give Us a Scientific Concept of Consciousness
Tucson, Arizona, April 8-12, 2002
PDF: 40 slides, 3.5 MB

Mindworlds
How Set Theory and Quantum Physics Can Give Us a Scientific Concept of Consciousness
March 2002
PDF: 162 slides, 7 MB

The Miph of Consciousness
The Mathematics, Informatics, and Physics of Consciousness and Its Place in Nature
Skövde, Sweden, August 7-11, 2001
PDF: 85 slides, 2 MB

Lifeball
Birth of a New God
Ross (1996)
PDF: 432 pages, 1.3 MB

We are not alone. And we are not the end of the line. Aliens from other star systems will find us one day. And our own machines will one day overtake us. Or both — at once. Jon Christie knew this. Androids and aliens didn't faze a computer jock with a CIA past. But even he was unprepared for the sudden, combined impact of these threats when he traveled to Japan in the summer of 2013 ...

The Globall Hyperatlas
A Development Proposal
The Visual Computer 8, 1-7 (1991)
PDF: 7 pages, 705 KB

Abstract. A future hardware system designed to support an interactive geographic database is outlined. The basic system is intended for domestic and educational use and extensions of the system are foreseen as serving a wide variety of professional users. The main physical and functional parameters of the system are presented. Possible problems are indicated and development goals are suggested. The aim of the paper is to initiate a detailed and informed discussion about how such a system may be developed.