Since I am retired, I have the time to indulge my curiosity about "new" technologies, especially those with strong connections to mathematics. I put "new" in quotes, because some of the ideas for these technologies aren't really new. In one of my previous careers, I worked at IBM Research in San Jose, CA in a department that was investigating different database models, one of which was an entity-relationship model based on graph structure. Its competitor was a relational database model whose team was headed by the inventor and pioneer of relational database, E. F. (Ted) Codd.
Needless to say, the relational model won out and was adopted by a development team at the Santa Teresa Programming Center, evolving to the present day DB2 product. I was part of the team that transferred the technology from research to development and ended up as the technical lead for its Query Management Facility (QMF).
My interest with Neo4j is to revisit graphs as a database model and to learn how Neo4j is implemented in the cloud and how it incorporates machine learning. To pursue this, I would like to start a project that creates a graph for academic citation tracing, clustering and co-location of interests.
