As some of you might already know, I have started my PhD studies at the University of Helsinki. My research area is Big Data and Unified Databases. It has been extremely interesting but the highlight so far was last week: the 32nd IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE  2016) was held in my home town, Helsinki. I was not just attending and working as a volunteer but I was also chairing one of the conference sessions: Research 6B: Analytics on Big Data (http://icde2016.fi/pre_program.php#Q1-1-196)! On Monday I was attending and web co-chairing/coordinating the First Europe-China Workshop on Big Data (http://udbms.cs.helsinki.fi/BigData2016/). On Friday I was attending and assisting with the Workshop on Keyword Search and Data Exploration on Structured Data, KEYS 2016, (http://keys2016.cs.helsinki.fi/).

That was a busy week but I could not find a better way to get to know the academic world! It was an amazing week!