The 5th TCS Excellence in Computer Science Week (TECS Week 2007) was held at TRDDC, Pune from 3–7 January 2007. It was conducted by Tata Research Development and Design Centre (TRDDC) jointly with United Nations University (UNU/IIST) and Indian Association for Research in Computing Science (IARCS). Each TECS Week is an advanced workshop on a relevant topic related to computer science and software engineering, and aims at providing high-quality computer science education to students, teachers and practitioners from developing countries. TECS Week 2007 was on Data-intensive Computing, and a panel of internationally renowned experts presented overviews of the cutting-edge techniques for addressing issues in Data-intensive Computing.

Professor Kurose talked about CASA (Collaborative Adaptive Sensing of the Atmosphere), a case-study of a data-driven sense-and-response system. He elaborated on problems and solutions in collecting, analyzing and presenting data in large sensor networks with a specific application to meteorological sensing.

Professor Muthukrishnan talked about algorithms for analyzing massive streams of data. He provided insight into data stream models, sublinear space/time algorithms, compressed sensing and massive distributed systems. He illustrated the algorithms with several interesting examples in IP network traffic analysis, web traffic analysis and signal processing.

Professor Raghu talked about the recent trends in databases with a special emphasis on data mining and exploratory analysis. He covered a variety of topics such as DBMS support for complex data analysis (OLAP, warehousing, view materialization), database support for exploratory data mining, and web data management.

Professor Alex Smola gave a detailed picture of active topics in machine learning such as Support Vector Machines (SVM) and other kernel-based learning methods. He provided an overview of support vector classification and regression, novelty detection, and quantile regression. He introduced several kernel-based methods and illustrated them with applications to named entity recognition and ranking of web pages for search engines.

The topics covered at TECS Week 2007 introduced the participants to a wide range of issues in data-intensive computing, some highly theoretical and some highly application-oriented. Yet, a big picture integrating these varied issues seemed to emerge at towards the end of the workshop, which participants could greatly appreciate.