[Nets-seminars] faculty candidate talk: Alvin Cheung (MIT), 2 PM, Friday 11th April

[Brad Karp]

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Greetings, everyone.

It's my pleasure to announce the next talk by a candidate for a
faculty position in the Systems and Networks Research Group.

Alvin Cheung of MIT CSAIL will be speaking at 2 PM this Friday, the
11th of April, on his exciting work that brings program analysis and
synthesis techniques to bear on real-world database-backed
applications. Alvin has built systems that analyze server-side
workloads divided between an application server and back-end database,
and can automatically move computation across the application/database
boundary so as to maximize end-to-end system performance.

All strongly encouraged to attend!

Talk announcement follows below.

- -Brad, bkarp at cs.ucl.ac.uk

- ---

UCL CS Faculty Candidate Talk

Speaker:        Alvin Cheung (MIT CSAIL)
                http://people.csail.mit.edu/akcheung/

Time and place: 2 PM, Fri 11 Apr, MPEB 1.03

Title:          Rethinking the Application-Database Interface

Abstract:

- From social networking websites to bank transactions, we interact with
data-intensive applications every day. Such applications are typically
hosted on an application server that interacts with a database server
to manipulate persistent data. To make such applications efficient,
developers face the daunting task of mastering the intricacies of both
the programming system and the database management system. For
instance, while many application features can be implemented in either
the application or pushed into the database, it is difficult for a
programmer to decide where to place a given computation as the
decision is typically workload-driven. Unfortunately, making the wrong
choice often results in drastic performance hit.

In this talk, I will show how examining both the programming and
database management systems at the same time allows us to
significantly improve the performance of data-intensive applications.
To illustrate such co-optimization opportunities, I have designed,
built, and evaluated three systems: Query By Synthesis, a tool that
converts functionality written as imperative code into relational
queries; Sloth, a system that combines queries embedded in
applications into batches; and Pyxis, a system that seamlessly moves
computation between application and database servers. Using real-world
examples, I will show that these systems allow orders of magnitude
performance improvement and graceful adaptation to changing server
environments while preserving the high-level programming interface to
the developer. My work has been featured in ACM Tech News and included
in graduate seminar courses. We have also received requests from more
than 50 individuals and institutions who are interested in trying out
our tools.

Bio:

Alvin Cheung is a Ph.D. candidate at MIT. His research interests
include applying program analysis and synthesis techniques to help
developers implement and optimize large software systems. Alvin has
also done research in programming mobile phones and building software
development tools, and has previously won the best paper award at
CIDR. He is a recipient of the NDSEG, NSF, and Intel Ph.D.
fellowships, and received his undergraduate degrees in electrical
engineering, computer systems engineering, and music from Stanford.
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