Demo Data from VLDB 2026 / reviewers in the wild / expert
Zhichen Xu
dblp:47/192
· DBLP profile ↗
21ranked-venue papers
10as first author
2since 2021 · last 2025
0009-0004-6513-9983ORCID · corroborated
Domains — the database's venue-derived domains; a paper can count in several
Systems, architecture and hardware · 8 · 4 first-authorComputer networks · 4 · 2 first-authorSoftware engineering, systems software and programming languages · 4 · 3 first-authorDatabases, data management, data science and information retrieval · 3 · 1 first-author · 2 since 2021Graphics, computer vision, multimedia, augmented reality and games · 2Applied, interdisciplinary, general and emerging computing · 1
Expertise — from the expertise taxonomy: the topics of the expert's papers under the CCF categories. A weight counts papers with recency: 1 for a paper about the topic, 0.3 when the topic is its context, halved every five years.
| Databases, data mining, and information retrieval
4 papers |
Data integration and cleaning · 53% Distributed and cloud data management · 25% Database system architecture and tuning · 18% | |
| Computer architecture, parallel and distributed computing, and storage systems
6 papers |
Distributed systems · 52% Performance modeling and evaluation · 26% Parallel and multicore computing · 13% | |
| Network and information security
2 papers |
Network security · 43% Privacy and data protection · 22% Cryptographic protocols and secure computation · 22% |
Topics — the 21 heaviest of 29, each with the papers that count most for it
| Topic | Weight | Papers | Last | Evidence papers |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Data integration and cleaning
data quality |
0.9 | 1 | 2025 | Unlocking the Power of CI/CD for Data Pipelines in Distributed Data Warehouses · Proc. VLDB Endow. 2025 |
Distributed and cloud data management › distributed data store
distributed data warehouse |
0.3 | 1 | 2025 | Unlocking the Power of CI/CD for Data Pipelines in Distributed Data Warehouses · Proc. VLDB Endow. 2025 |
Distributed systems
peer-to-peer systems |
0.1 | 3 | 2004 | On scaling latent semantic indexing for large peer-to-peer systems · SIGIR 2004 Low-Cost and Reliable Mutual Anonymity Protocols in Peer-to-Peer Networks · IEEE Trans. Parallel Distributed Syst. 2003 Peer-to-peer information retrieval using self-organizing semantic overlay networks · SIGCOMM 2003 |
Information retrieval › retrieval models › latent semantic models
latent semantic indexing |
0.0 | 1 | 2004 | On scaling latent semantic indexing for large peer-to-peer systems · SIGIR 2004 |
Distributed systems › distributed data processing
distributed indexing |
0.0 | 1 | 2004 | On scaling latent semantic indexing for large peer-to-peer systems · SIGIR 2004 |
Information retrieval
distributed information retrieval |
0.0 | 1 | 2003 | Peer-to-peer information retrieval using self-organizing semantic overlay networks · SIGCOMM 2003 |
Information retrieval › distributed information retrieval
peer-to-peer search |
0.0 | 1 | 2003 | Peer-to-peer information retrieval using self-organizing semantic overlay networks · SIGCOMM 2003 |
Internet architecture and protocols
overlay networks |
0.0 | 1 | 2003 | Turning Heterogeneity into an Advantage in Overlay Routing · INFOCOM 2003 |
Privacy and data protection
anonymity |
0.0 | 1 | 2003 | Low-Cost and Reliable Mutual Anonymity Protocols in Peer-to-Peer Networks · IEEE Trans. Parallel Distributed Syst. 2003 |
Network security › anonymity networks › anonymous communication
mutual anonymity |
0.0 | 1 | 2003 | Low-Cost and Reliable Mutual Anonymity Protocols in Peer-to-Peer Networks · IEEE Trans. Parallel Distributed Syst. 2003 |
Network security › anonymity networks
peer-to-peer anonymity |
0.0 | 1 | 2003 | Low-Cost and Reliable Mutual Anonymity Protocols in Peer-to-Peer Networks · IEEE Trans. Parallel Distributed Syst. 2003 |
Cryptographic protocols and secure computation › secure computation protocols › setup assumptions
trusted third party |
0.0 | 1 | 2003 | Low-Cost and Reliable Mutual Anonymity Protocols in Peer-to-Peer Networks · IEEE Trans. Parallel Distributed Syst. 2003 |
Performance modeling and evaluation › program instrumentation
dynamic instrumentation |
0.0 | 1 | 1999 | Dynamic Instrumentation of Threaded Applications · PPoPP 1999 |
Memory systems
cache coherence |
0.0 | 1 | 1997 | Shared Memory Performance Profiling · PPoPP 1997 |
Performance modeling and evaluation
profiling |
0.0 | 1 | 1997 | Shared Memory Performance Profiling · PPoPP 1997 |
Parallel and multicore computing
shared-memory parallel programs |
0.0 | 1 | 1997 | Shared Memory Performance Profiling · PPoPP 1997 |
Internet architecture and protocols › quality of service
network delay |
0.0 | 1 | 2003 | Turning Heterogeneity into an Advantage in Overlay Routing · INFOCOM 2003 |
Network performance modeling › protocol performance analysis
routing performance |
0.0 | 1 | 2003 | Turning Heterogeneity into an Advantage in Overlay Routing · INFOCOM 2003 |
Parallel and multicore computing › parallel computing › parallel application performance
multithreaded application performance |
0.0 | 1 | 1999 | Dynamic Instrumentation of Threaded Applications · PPoPP 1999 |
Performance modeling and evaluation
bottleneck analysis |
0.0 | 1 | 1997 | Shared Memory Performance Profiling · PPoPP 1997 |
Parallel and multicore computing › parallel programming models
shared-memory parallelization |
0.0 | 1 | 1997 | Shared Memory Performance Profiling · PPoPP 1997 |
Methods — techniques the papers use, named apart from their topics
production-configuration-driven testing · 0.9algebraic dependency model · 0.9dynamic programming · 0.7simulation · 0.1singular value decomposition · 0.1protocol design · 0.1latent semantic indexing · 0.1static analysis · 0.1thread-conscious locks · 0.0per-thread virtual CPU timers · 0.0low-contention data structures · 0.0dynamic instrumentation · 0.0cache coherence protocol exploitation · 0.0semi-empirical modeling · 0.0
| Year | Publication | Venue | Position |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2025 | Unlocking the Power of CI/CD for Data Pipelines in Distributed Data WarehousesabstractEnsuring the reliability of data pipelines is critical for modern data-driven organizations, yet building robust Continuous Integration (CI) in large, distributed data warehouses remains a significant challenge. Complexities arising from distributed ownership, the high cost of replicating production environments, and the rapid evolution of business logic lead to fragile pipelines and costly failures. This paper introduces a novel CI framework designed to conquer these challenges, achieving 94.5% pre-production issue detection in YouTube's data warehouse while dramatically reducing resource consumption. Our key innovation lies in a production-coniguration-driven testing methodology, that enables scalable, isolated testing directly within the production environment. This approach reduces testing overhead and ensures high test fidelity. Furthermore, we present a lineage-aware impact analysis framework that automatically propagates data quality checks across distributed pipeline components based on an algebraic dependency model, ensuring data consistency and promoting cross-team collaboration. This production-proven solution provides a practical blueprint for CI/CD in complex, large-scale environments. Zhichen Xu, Sergey Yudin |
Proc. VLDB Endow. | 2 |
| 2023 | Keep Your Distributed Data Warehouse Consistent at a Minimal CostabstractLarge data warehouses store interdependent tables that are updated independently in response to business logic changes or late arrival of critical data. To keep the warehouse consistent, changes to upstream tables need to be propagated to downstream tables in a timely fashion. However, a naive change propagation algorithm can cause many unnecessary updates or recalculations of downstream tables, which drives up the cost of data warehouse management. In this paper, we describe our solution that can ensure the eventual consistency of the data warehouse while avoiding unnecessary table updates. We also show that the optimal trade-off between computational cost reduction and meeting data freshness constraints can be found by solving a dynamic programming problem. The proposed solution is currently in production to manage the YouTube Data Warehouse and has reduced update requests by 25% by eliminating non-trivial duplicates. These requests would have been carried out by large batch jobs over big data. Eliminating them has led to a proportionate reduction in computing resources. One key advantage of our approach is that it can be used in a heterogeneous, distributed data warehouse environment where the operator software may not have complete control over the query processors. This is because our approach only relies on having dependency information for tables and can operate on the post-state of data sources. Zhichen Xu, Andrew Davidson 0001 |
Proc. ACM Manag. Data | 1 |
| 2004 | Semantic-enhanced distribution & adaptation networksabstractRecent years have witnessed significant efforts in deriving and embedding semantic information in content for improved content retrieval, adaptation, and distribution. Relatively little work considers leveraging this semantic information in the infrastructure to better serve the needs of clients and achieve better cost-effectiveness of infrastructure resources. In this paper, we identify semantics that can be derived and extracted from the various components in a content distribution infrastructure, namely content semantics (from content source), infrastructure semantics and client semantics (from content consumer). We develop a semantic-enhanced distribution and adaptation framework (SEDAN) that achieves superior efficiency and provides content access and adaptation features that were not previously possible Bo Shen 0003, Zhichen Xu, Susie J. Wee, John G. Apostolopoulos |
ICME | 2 |
| 2004 | Semantic-enhanced distribution and adaptation networksabstractRecent years have witnessed significant efforts in deriving and embedding semantic information in content for improved content retrieval, adaptation, and distribution. Relatively little work considers leveraging this semantic information in the infrastructure to serve the needs of clients better and achieve better cost-effectiveness of infrastructure resources. We identify semantics that can be derived and extracted from the various components in a content distribution infrastructure, namely content semantics (from content source), infrastructure semantics and client semantics (from content consumer). We develop a semantic-enhanced distribution and adaptation framework (SEDAN) that achieves superior efficiency and provides content access and adaptation features that were not previously possible. Bo Shen 0003, Zhichen Xu, Susie J. Wee, John G. Apostolopoulos |
ICME | 2 |
| 2004 | On scaling latent semantic indexing for large peer-to-peer systemsabstractThe exponential growth of data demands scalable infrastructures capable of indexing and searching rich content such as text, music, and images. A promising direction is to combine information retrieval with peer-to-peer technology for scalability, fault-tolerance, and low administration cost. One pioneering work along this direction is pSearch [32, 33]. pSearch places documents onto a peerto-peer overlay network according to semantic vectors produced using Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI). The search cost for a query is reduced since documents related to the query are likely to be co-located on a small number of nodes. Unfortunately, because of its reliance on LSI, pSearch also inherits the limitations of LSI. (1) When the corpus is large and heterogeneous, LSI’s retrieval quality is inferior to methods such as Okapi. (2) The Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) used in LSI is unscalable in terms of both Chunqiang Tang, Sandhya Dwarkadas, Zhichen Xu |
SIGIR | 3 |
| 2003 | Towards a Semantic-Aware File Store
Zhichen Xu, Magnus Karlsson 0002, Chunqiang Tang, Christos T. Karamanolis |
HotOS | 1 |
| 2003 | Mutual Anonymity Protocols for Hybrid Peer-to-Peer SystemsabstractIn a hybrid peer-to-peer (P2P) system, some operations are intentionally centralized, such as indexing of peers' files. We present several protocols to achieve mutual communication anonymity between an information requester and a provider in a hybrid P2P information-sharing environment with trusted index servers such that neither the requester, nor the provider can identify each other and no other peers can identify the two communicating parties with certainty. Some existing protocols provide solutions to achieve mutual anonymity in pure P2P systems without any trusted central controls. Compared with two representative protocols, our proposed mutual anonymity protocols improve efficiency by utilizing trusted third parties and aiming at both reliability and low-cost. We show that with some limited central support, our protocols can accomplish the goals of anonymity, efficiency, and reliability. We have evaluated our techniques in a browser-sharing environment. We show that the average increase in response time caused by our protocols is trivial, and these protocols show advantages over existing protocols in a hybrid P2P system. Li Xiao 0001, Zhichen Xu, Xiaodong Zhang 0001 |
ICDCS | 2 |
| 2003 | Building Topology-Aware Overlays Using Global Soft-StatabstractDistributed hash table (DHT) based overlay networks offer an administration-free and fault-tolerant storage space that maps "keys" to "values". For these systems to function efficiently, their structures must fit that of the underlying network. Existing techniques for discovering network proximity information, such as landmark clustering and expanding-ring search are either inaccurate or expensive. The lack of global proximity information in overlay construction and maintenance can result in bad proximity approximation or excessive communication. To address these problems, we propose the following: (1) Combining landmark clustering and round-trip time (RTT) measurements to generate proximity information, achieving both efficiency and accuracy. (2) Controlled placement of global proximity information on the system itself as soft-state, such that nodes can independently access relevant information efficiently. (3) Publish/subscribe functionality that allows nodes to subscribe to the relevant soft-state and get notified as the state changes necessitate overlay restructuring. Zhichen Xu, Chunqiang Tang, Zheng Zhang 0001 |
ICDCS | 1 |
| 2003 | Turning Heterogeneity into an Advantage in Overlay RoutingabstractDistributed hash table (DHT)-based overlay networks, represented by Pastry, CAN, and Chord, offer an administration-free and fault-tolerant application-level overlay network. While elegant from a theoretical perspective, these systems have some disadvantages. First, they rely on application-level routing, which may be inefficient with respect to network delays and bandwidth consumption. Second, they typically construct a homogeneously structured overlay even though nodes in these networks usually have varying physical connectivity and packet-forwarding capacities. In this paper, we propose two approaches for constructing an auxiliary expressway network to take advantage of the different connectivity, forwarding capacities, and availabilities of the nodes. As a result, we are able to reconcile the conflict of presenting the applications with a homogeneous structured overlay to simplify management, while at the same time taking advantage of the inherent heterogeneity of the underlying physical network to speed up routing. Our simulation results show that our expressway can achieve close to optimal routing performance (on average, 1.07 and 1.41 times optimal routing for an Internet-like topology and a large synthesized transit-stub graph, respectively) in overlay networks. Zhichen Xu, Mallik Mahalingam, Magnus Karlsson 0002 |
INFOCOM | 1 |
| 2003 | RITA: receiver initiated just-in-time tree adaptation for rich media distributionabstractApplication-level multicast networks overlaid on unicast IP networks are increasingly gaining in importance. While there have been several proposals for overlay multicast networks, very few of them focus on the stringent requirements of real-time applications such as streaming media. We propose RITA (Receiver Initiated Timely Adaptation) framework for an efficient overlay multicast infrastructure. RITA is based on a combination of landmark clustering and RTT measurements, and is particularly suitable for multimedia real-time applications. Our goal is to balance the network-oriented goals of building an efficient multicast tree with the application-oriented goals of providing good QoS with minimal disruptions. Using accurate global soft state information tables, our approach promptly constructs and reconfigures high quality trees. A distinguishing feature of our approach is that the tree reconfiguration is initiated just-in-time by the application client at the receiver when the media quality falls below a specific threshold. The goal is to achieve dynamic tree reconfiguration with very low switching delay such that end users do not perceive any application performance degradation. Zhichen Xu, Chunqiang Tang, Sujata Banerjee, Sung-Ju Lee 0001 |
NOSSDAV | 1 |
| 2003 | Peer-to-peer information retrieval using self-organizing semantic overlay networksabstractContent-based full-text search is a challenging problem in Peer-to-Peer (P2P) systems. Traditional approaches have either been centralized or use flooding to ensure accuracy of the results returned. In this paper, we present pSearch, a decentralized non-flooding P2P information retrieval system. pSearch distributes document indices through the P2P network based on document semantics generated by Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI). The search cost (in terms of different nodes searched and data transmitted) for a given query is thereby reduced, since the indices of semantically related documents are likely to be co-located in the network. We also describe techniques that help distribute the indices more evenly across the nodes, and further reduce the number of nodes accessed using appropriate index distribution as well as using index samples and recently processed queries to guide the search. Experiments show that pSearch can achieve performance comparable to centralized information retrieval systems by searching only a small number of nodes. For a system with 128,000 nodes and 528,543 documents (from news, magazines, etc.), pSearch searches only 19 nodes and transmits only 95.5KB data during the search, whereas the top 15 documents returned by pSearch and LSI have a 91.7 % intersection. Chunqiang Tang, Zhichen Xu, Sandhya Dwarkadas |
SIGCOMM | 2 |
| 2003 | Low-Cost and Reliable Mutual Anonymity Protocols in Peer-to-Peer NetworksabstractWe present several protocols to achieve mutual communication anonymity between an information requester and a provider in a P2P information-sharing environment, such that neither the requester nor the provider can identify each other, and no other peers can identify the two communicating parties with certainty. Most existing solutions achieve mutual anonymity in pure P2P systems without any trusted central controls. Compared with two such representative ones, our protocols improve efficiency in two different ways. First, utilizing trusted third parties and aiming at both reliability and low-cost, we propose a group of mutual anonymity protocols. We show that with some limited central support, our protocols can accomplish the goals of anonymity, efficiency, and reliability. Second, we propose a mutual anonymity protocol which relies solely on self-organizations among peers without any trusted central controls. In this protocol, the returning path can be shorter than the requesting path. This protocol does not need to broadcast the requested file back to the requester so that the bandwidth is saved and efficiency is improved. In addition, this protocol does not need special nodes to keep indices of sharing files, thus eliminating the index maintenance overhead and the potential for inconsistency between index records and peer file contents. We have evaluated our techniques in a browser-sharing environment. We show that the average increase in response time caused by our protocols is negligible, and these protocols show advantages over existing protocols in a P2P system. Li Xiao 0001, Zhichen Xu, Xiaodong Zhang 0001 |
IEEE Trans. Parallel Distributed Syst. | 2 |
| 2002 | Scalable, Efficient Range Queries for Grid Information ServicesabstractRecent peer-to-peer (P2P) systems such as Tapestry, Chord or CAN act primarily as a distributed hash table (DHT). A DHT is a data structure for distributed storing of pairs (key, data) which allows fast locating of data when a key is given. To facilitate efficient queries on a range of keys, we propose a CAN-based extension of this DHT-functionality. The design of our extension suggests several range query strategies; their efficiency is investigated in the paper. A further goal is to enhance the routing aspects of current DHT-systems so that frequently changing data can also be handled efficiently. We show that relatively simple approaches are able to reduce the communication overhead in this case. The design of the system is driven by its application as a part of the information infrastructure for computational grids. Such grids provide an infrastructure for sharing computing resources; an information infrastructure is their inherent part which collects resource data and provides search functionality. Our approach complements current solutions such as MDS-2 by adding self-organization, fault-tolerance and an ability to efficiently handle dynamic attributes, such as server processing capacity. We evaluate our system in this context via a simulation and show that its design along with particular query and update strategies meet the goals of scalability, communication-efficiency and availability. Artur Andrzejak 0001, Zhichen Xu |
Peer-to-Peer Computing | 2 |
| 2001 | Typestate Checking of Machine Code
Zhichen Xu, Thomas W. Reps, Barton P. Miller |
ESOP | 1 |
| 2000 | Safety checking of machine codeabstractWe show how to determine statically whether it is safe for untrusted machine code to be loaded into a trusted host system. Zhichen Xu, Barton P. Miller, Thomas W. Reps |
PLDI | 1 |
| 1999 | Dynamic Instrumentation of Threaded ApplicationsabstractThe use of threads is becoming commonplace in both sequential and parallel programs. This paper describes our design and initial experience with non-trace based performance instrumentation techniques for threaded programs. Our goal is to provide detailed performance data while maintaining control of instrumentation costs. We have extended Paradyn's dynamic instrumentation (which can instrument programs without recompiling or relinking) to handle threaded programs.Controlling instrumentation costs means efficient instrumentation code and avoiding locks in the instrumentation. Our design is based on low contention data structures. To associate performance data with individual threads, we have all threads share the same instrumentation code and assign each thread with its own private copy of performance counters or timers. The asynchrony in a threaded program poses a major challenge to dynamic instrumentation. To implement time-based metrics on a per-thread basis, we need to instrument thread context switches, which can cause instrumentation code to interleave. Interleaved instrumentation can not only corrupt performance data, but can also cause a scenario we call self-deadlock where an instrumentation code deadlocks a thread. We introduce thread-conscious locks to avoid self-deadlock, and per-thread virtual CPU timers to reduce the chance of interleaved instrumentation accessing the same performance counter or timer, and to reduce the number of expensive timer calls at thread context switches.Our initial implementation is on SPARC Solaris 2.5 and 2.6 including multiprocessor Sun UltraSPARC Enterprise machines. We tested our tool on large multithreaded applications, including the Java Virtual Machine (JVM). We show how our new techniques helped us to speed up a Java graphics native method by 42% and consequently increase by 24% the amount of work that can be done in unit time in a game applet. Zhichen Xu, Barton P. Miller, Oscar Naim |
PPoPP | 1 |
| 1997 | Shared Memory Performance ProfilingabstractThis paper describes a new approach to finding performance bottlenecks in shared-memory parallel programs and its embodiment in the Paradyn Parallel Performance Tools running with the Blizzard fine-grain distributed shared memory system. This approach exploits the underlying system's cache coherence protocol to detect data sharing patterns that indicate potential performance bottlenecks and presents performance measurements in a data-centric manner. As a demonstration, Parodyn helped us improve the performance of a new shared-memory application program by a factor of four. Zhichen Xu, James R. Larus, Barton P. Miller |
PPoPP | 1 |
| 1996 | Semi-Empirical Multiprocessor Performance Predictions
Zhichen Xu, Xiaodong Zhang 0001 |
J. Parallel Distributed Comput. | 1 |
| 1995 | Multiprocessor Scalability Predictions Through Detailed Program Execution AnalysisabstractScalability measures the ability of a parallel system to improve performance as the size of an application problem and the number of processors involved increase. There are some limits to existing scalability studies. First, the problem size in a computation is not well-defined. Second, the methods used to differentiate algorithmic and architectural scalabilities are not effective enough. Thirdly, most approaches to scalability study are either highly time-consuming or restricted to simple problem/architecture structures. A major effort of this work is to address these limits. We have extended the latency metric [11] for more complex scaling of problems, and to possibly isolate the scalability of an algorithm from a parallel system. The scalability prediction is based on a semi-empirical approach [10] that significantly reduces the time and cost of measurements and simulation. Our prediction results were validated on the KSR-1 and on the CM-5. 1 Introduction There are some limits to ... Xiaodong Zhang 0001, Zhichen Xu |
International Conference on Supercomputing | 2 |
| 1995 | A Semi-Empirical Approach to Scalability StudyabstractNo abstract available. Xiaodong Zhang 0001, Zhichen Xu |
SIGMETRICS | 2 |
| 1993 | CCD: An integrated C coding and debugging tool
Liqun Jin, Zhichen Xu, Jiahau Qian |
J. Comput. Sci. Technol. | 3 |