This paper introduces semi-ring dictionaries, a powerful class of compositional and purely functional collections that subsume other collection types such as sets, multisets, arrays, vectors, and matrices. We developed SDQL, a statically typed language that can express relational algebra with aggregations, linear algebra, and functional collections over data such as relations and matrices using semi-ring dictionaries. Furthermore, thanks to the algebraic structure behind these dictionaries, SDQL unifies a wide range of optimizations commonly used in databases (DB) and linear algebra (LA). As a result, SDQL enables efficient processing of hybrid DB and LA workloads, by putting together optimizations that are otherwise confined to either DB systems or LA frameworks. We show experimentally that a handful of DB and LA workloads can take advantage of the SDQL language and optimizations. SDQL can be competitive with or outperforms a host of systems that are state of the art in their own domain: in-memory DB systems Typer and Tectorwise for (flat, not nested) relational data; SciPy for LA workloads; sparse tensor compiler taco; the Trance nested relational engine; and the in-database machine learning engines LMFAO and Morpheus for hybrid DB/LA workloads over relational data.

Nested relational query languages have long been seen as an attractive tool for scenarios involving large hierarchical datasets. There has been a resurgence of interest in nested relational languages. One driver has been the affinity of these languages for large-scale processing platforms such as Spark and Flink. This demonstration gives a tour of TraNCE, a new system for processing nested data on top of distributed processing systems. The core innovation of the system is a compiler that processes nested relational queries in a series of transformations; these include variants of two prior techniques, shredding and unnesting, as well as a materialization transformation that customizes the way levels of the nested output are generated. The TraNCE platform builds on these techniques by adding components for users to create and visualize queries, as well as data exploration and notebook execution targets to facilitate the construction of large-scale data science applications. The demonstration will both showcase the system from the viewpoint of usability by data scientists and illustrate the data management techniques employed.

While large-scale distributed data processing platforms have become an attractive target for query processing, these systems are problematic for applications that deal with nested collections. Programmers are forced either to perform non-trivial translations of collection programs or to employ automated flattening procedures, both of which lead to performance problems. These challenges only worsen for nested collections with skewed cardinalities, where both handcrafted rewriting and automated flattening are unable to enforce load balancing across partitions. In this work, we propose a framework that translates a program manipulating nested collections into a set of semantically equivalent shredded queries that can be efficiently evaluated. The framework employs a combination of query compilation techniques, an efficient data representation for nested collections, and automated skew-handling. We provide an extensive experimental evaluation, demonstrating significant improvements provided by the framework in diverse scenarios for nested collection programs.

Persistent cough is a symptom common to a number of respiratory disorders; however, reliable monitoring of cough frequency and cough severity over an extended period of time can be a challenge. Traditional methods involve subjective evaluation by care providers or patient self-reports. As an alternative, we propose an objective method for monitoring cough using a wearable microphone. We collected 24-hour audio recordings from 9 patients suffering from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, asthma, and lung cancer using the VitaloJAK wearable microphone. Trained professionals carefully listened to each audio stream and manually labeled each cough event. Using this data, we propose a new neural-network-based cough detection scheme. A pre-processing algorithm is used to estimate the start and end of each cough and the deep neural network is trained using each cough instance. Experiments demonstrate an average leave-one-participant-out cross-validation specificity and sensitivity of 93.7% and 97.6% respectively.