Artificial Intelligence is increasingly playing an integral role in determining our day-to-day experiences. Moreover, with proliferation of AI based solutions in areas such as hiring, lending, criminal justice, healthcare, and education, the resulting personal and professional implications of AI are far-reaching. The dominant role played by AI models in these domains has led to a growing concern regarding potential bias in these models, and a demand for model transparency and interpretability. In addition, model explainability is a prerequisite for building trust and adoption of AI systems in high stakes domains requiring reliability and safety such as healthcare and automated transportation, and critical industrial applications with significant economic implications such as predictive maintenance, exploration of natural resources, and climate change modeling.

This paper describes the use of Storm at Twitter. Storm is a real-time fault-tolerant and distributed stream data processing system. Storm is currently being used to run various critical computations in Twitter at scale, and in real-time. This paper describes the architecture of Storm and its methods for distributed scale-out and fault-tolerance. This paper also describes how queries (aka. topologies) are executed in Storm, and presents some operational stories based on running Storm at Twitter. We also present results from an empirical evaluation demonstrating the resilience of Storm in dealing with machine failures. Storm is under active development at Twitter and we also present some potential directions for future work.

The web today is increasingly characterized by social and real-time signals, which we believe represent two frontiers in information retrieval. In this paper, we present Early bird, the core retrieval engine that powers Twitter's real-time search service. Although Early bird builds and maintains inverted indexes like nearly all modern retrieval engines, its index structures differ from those built to support traditional web search. We describe these differences and present the rationale behind our design. A key requirement of real-time search is the ability to ingest content rapidly and make it searchable immediately, while concurrently supporting low-latency, high-throughput query evaluation. These demands are met with a single-writer, multiple-reader concurrency model and the targeted use of memory barriers. Early bird represents a point in the design space of real-time search engines that has worked well for Twitter's needs. By sharing our experiences, we hope to spur additional interest and innovation in this exciting space.

Various constrained frequent pattern mining problem formulations and associated algorithms have been developed that enable the user to specify various itemset-based constraints that better capture the underlying application requirements and characteristics. In this paper we introduce a new class of block constraints that determine the significance of an itemset pattern by considering the dense block that is formed by the pattern's items and its associated set of transactions. Block constraints provide a natural framework by which a number of important problems can be specified and make it possible to solve numerous problems on binary and real-valued datasets. However, developing computationally efficient algorithms to find these block constraints poses a number of challenges as unlike the different itemset-based constraints studied earlier, these block constraints are tough as they are neither anti-monotone, monotone, nor convertible. To overcome this problem, we introduce a new class of pruning methods that significantly reduce the overall search space and present a computationally efficient and scalable algorithm called CBMiner to find the closed itemsets that satisfy the block constraints.