Karl Aberer (Panel Chair) EPFL	Amr El Abbadi UCSB	Ramesh Jain UCI	Dimitrios Gunopulos UCR	Wei Hong Intel Research, Berkeley

Networking Meets Databases: Do we meet or merge?

The recent years brought a massive change in the way data management is viewed. Data is being increasingly processed within networks. P2P computing and sensor networks are the most prominent examples. The classical separation of information systems from communication systems is disolving. We can observe that very similar problems are addressed by what before seemed fairly disparate research communities. For example, the problem of aggregating and filtering data within networks is being studied simultanously in information theory and networking, both classical EE fields, as well as in distributed systems and databases, both classical CS fields. Even researchers from so seemingly unrelated disciplines such as physics start to investigate these problems. This raises a number of issues of how research in this field is organized now and ought to be organized in the future:

• Are we just facing a problem domain requiring classical interdisciplinary research? Or, are the classical disciplines no more adequate and new disciplines emerge?
• Are the research communities ready to open up? Is the communication across disciplines working? Does the current organization of research communities still make sense?
• Are we still educating future researchers in an adequate way?
• Which are examples of theoretical foundations and methodological approaches in one discipline that could open also new avenues for others?
• Which are challenges that only can be addressed by efforts spanning multiple disciplines (or by reshaping disciplines)?