This paper describes PlinyCompute, a system for development of high-performance, data-intensive, distributed computing tools and libraries. \emphIn the large, PlinyCompute presents the programmer with a very high-level, declarative interface, relying on automatic, relational-database style optimization to figure out how to stage distributed computations. However, in the small, PlinyCompute presents the capable systems programmer with a persistent object data model and API (the "PC object model'') and associated memory management system that has been designed from the ground-up for high performance, distributed, data-intensive computing. This contrasts with most other Big Data systems, which are constructed on top of the Java Virtual Machine (JVM), and hence must at least partially cede performance-critical concerns such as memory management (including layout and de/allocation) and virtual method/function dispatch to the JVM. This hybrid approach---declarative in the large, trusting the programmer's ability to utilize PC object model efficiently in the small---results in a system that is ideal for the development of reusable, data-intensive tools and libraries.

Many cloud-based data management and analytics systems support complex objects. Dataflow platforms such as Spark and Flink allow programmers to manipulate sets consisting of objects from a host programming language (often Java). Document databases such as MongoDB make use of hierarchical interchange formats---most popularly JSON---which embody a data model where individual records can themselves contain sets of records. Systems such as Dremel and AsterixDB allow complex nesting of data structures.

Usage of background knowledge about events and their relations to other concepts in the application domain, can improve the quality of event processing. In this paper, we describe a system for knowledge-based event detection of complex stock market events based on available background knowledge about stock market companies. Our system profits from data fusion of live event stream and background knowledge about companies which is stored in a knowledge base. Users of our system can express their queries in a rule language which provides functionalities to specify semantic queries about companies in the SPARQL query language for querying the external knowledge base and combine it with event data stream. Background makes it possible to detect stock market events based on companies attributes and not only based on syntactic processing of stock price and volume.

Traditional approaches for data storage and analysis are facing their limits when handling the enormous data amounts of today's applications. We believe that a radical departure from contemporary architectures of stores is necessary to satisfy that central scalability requirement. One of the most promising new schools of thought in system design are swarm intelligent and swarm-based approaches for data distribution and organization. In this paper, we describe our current work on a swarm-based storage service for Semantic Web data. This storage service utilizes algorithms discovered in the behavior of ant colonies. We describe these algorithms and our enhancements to them as well as our evaluation of the implementation.