>>The economic development in Japan and China--after Expo and the Olympic Games

Speaker: Kazuhiko Yokoi, associate professor at Doshisha University Faculty of Economics.

Venue: Room 108, History Department, Jingyuan Courtyard No.2.

Date: Mar. 11, 2011 (Saturday)

Time: 14:30-16:30

Organizer: PKU History Department

>>Sociology of Rule

Speaker: Wolfgang Schluchter is Professor of Sociology and Director of the Institut Für Soziologie at Ruprecht-Karls-Universit？t Heidelberg. He is one of the world's foremost experts on the sociology of Max Weber and has written on a wide range of topics from a Weberian perspective, including the rise of rationalism in modern society, religious commitment in the modern world, and the intersection of interpretative sociology and systems theory. His publications in English include, The Rise of Western Rationalism: Max Weber's Developmental History (University of California, 1985); Rationalism, Religion, and Domination: A Weberian Perspective (University of California, 1989); Paradoxes of Modernity: Culture and Conduct in the Theory of Max Weber (Stanford University, 1996); Max Weber & Islam (Stanford University 1999), co-edited with Toby Huff; and Public Spheres and Collective Identities (Transaction 2001), co-edited with S. N. Eisenstadt.

Venue: Room 304, Classroom Building No.3

Date: Mar. 11, 2011 (Saturday)

Time: 18:30-20:00

Organizer: PKU School of Education

Intro: The lecture would be in German with Chinese interpretation.

>>Finding Hidden Structures: Keyword Queries in Relational Databases

Speaker: Prof. Jeffrey Xu

Prof. Jeffrey Xu Yu is a Professor in the Department of Systems Engineering and Engineering Management, the Chinese University of Hong Kong. His current main research interests include keywords search in relational databases, graph mining, graph query processing, and graph pattern matching. Prof. Yu served/serves in over 200 organization committees and program committees in international conferences/workshops. Prof. Yu also served as an associate editor of IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering (2004-2008), and served in VLDB Journal editorial board and ACM SIGMOD executive committee. He has published over 230 papers including papers published in reputed journals and major international conferences. His personal homepage is: http://www.se.cuhk.edu.hk/people/yu.html.

Venue: Founder Building 421

Date: Mar.14, 2011 (Monday)

Time: 10:00-11:30

Organizer: Institute of computer science and technology of PKU

Intro: Relational database management systems (RDBMSs) have been widely used over decades. On the direction of DB/IR integration, keyword search in relational databases (RDBs) has been extensively studied recently. A keyword search (or a keyword query) in RDBs is specified by a set of keywords to explore the interconnected tuple structures in an RDB that cannot be easily identified using SQL on RDBMSs. In brief, it finds how the tuples containing the given keywords are connected via sequences of connections (foreign key references) among tuples in an RDB. In this talk, we focus on using SQL to compute all the interconnected tuple structures for a given keyword query.  First, we show that the current commercial RDBMSs are powerful enough to support such keyword queries in RDBs efficiently using a technique of tuple reduction we proposed. Second, we discuss parallel computing keyword queries on a multicore architecture. Third, we discuss how to compute structural statistics.

>>The Role of East Asian Monetary Cooperation

Speaker: Dr. Ulrich Volz, Senior Economist, German Development Institute

Venue: Meeting Room 302 of the new building of Economics Department

Date: Mar. 17, 2011 (Thursday)

Time: 14:00-16:00

Organizer: PKU Department of Economics

Intro: In this lecture, Ulrich Volz will discuss the development of the East Asian trade-production network as one of the underlying reasons for China’s current account surplus and the role that regional economic cooperation in East Asia, and regional monetary cooperation in particular, can play in reducing global imbalances. He will also review the costs and benefits of regional monetary integration in East Asia, and discuss different cooperation strategies. Ulrich Volz is a Senior Economist at the German Development Institute / Deutsches Institut für Entwicklungspolitik (DIE). He also teaches graduate courses in International Finance and International Monetary Relations at Freie Universit？t Berlin. Recent visiting positions include Visiting Scholar at the University of Oxford, Visiting Scholar at the European Central Bank, and JSPS Visiting Researcher at Aoyama Gakuin University, Tokyo. He studied economics at Philipps University Marburg, the University of Kent at Canterbury, University College London, Yale University, and the Free University of Berlin, from where he obtained a doctorate in economics. Before joining the German Development Institute in 2007, Ulrich was a Fox International Fellow and Max Kade Scholar at Yale University and a DekaBank Fellow at the Hamburg Institute of International Economics. His past work experience includes the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, London, and the European Central Bank, Frankfurt am Main. He also worked as a Research Assistant at the Institute for International Monetary Policy of the Deutsche Bundesbank Foundation at Freie Universit？t Berlin, and as a Consultant to KfW Development Bank in Hanoi. His research interests focus on international finance, monetary and financial cooperation and integration, open macroeconomics, financial market development, and development and transition economics. Ulrich is the editor or co-editor of several books, including Towards Monetary and Financial Integration in East Asia (Edward Elgar Publishing, May 2009), Regional and Global Liquidity Arrangements (DIE, October 2010), and Regional Integration, Economic Development and Global Governance (Edward Elgar Publishing, forthcoming 2011). He is the author of Prospects for Monetary Cooperation and Integration in East Asia, published by the MIT Press in June 2010.

Translated by: Ma Xiao
Edited by: Chen Miaojuan
Source: PKU Lecture Hall