Alex Aiken

dblp:a/AAiken · also Alexander Aiken · DBLP profile ↗
← Back
13ranked-venue papers in the field
3as first author
5since 2021 · last 2025
0000-0002-3723-9555ORCID · verified

Domains — venue-derived; a paper can count in several

Database Systems & Data Management · 10 (3 first)Data Mining & Knowledge Discovery · 3
YearPublicationVenuePosition
2025 Rottnest: Indexing Data Lakes for Search
abstract
Data lakes have become widely popular in managing enterprise data. Their widespread integration with query engines has allowed them to displace specialized data warehouses as the single source of truth for enterprise data. While the columnar storage format and block min-max indices allow query engines to achieve competitive performance on relational data analytics queries, they are not yet suitable for other search-oriented queries like full text and vector nearest neighbor search. We present Rottnest, a general system that builds additional lightweight indices on top of data lakes. We show that our system is more cost efficient compared to un-indexed data lakes or specialized databases across several orders of magnitude of total query loads and operating time horizons.
Sasha Krassovsky, Conor Kennedy, Alex Aiken, Weston Pace, Rain Jiang, Huayi Zhang
ICDE4
2025 Flexible Windowing for Correlation-Aware Ranking in Anomalous Environments
abstract
Analyzing time-series correlations is key to anomaly detection and incident diagnosis, but existing methods that rely on fixed time windows often fail or are inaccurate in environments with (a) missing adequate ground truth, (b) asynchronous signals, or (c) mixed sampling rates containing irregularities in signals. To provide anomaly-relevant signal correlations given these challenges, we propose AdaptWin, a novel method to adaptively select windows for a signal-pair of the same size with distinct positions, i.e., the specific start and end timestamps can differ, for correlation-aware ranking. Our window selection is based on deviations in (1) inter-arrival times and (2) observed values. This flexible window selection approach improves ranking by better capturing signal variations aligned with anomalies. Across three real-world datasets, AdaptWin improves anomaly-relevant ranking by over 3 x compared to adaptive baselines.
Anwesha Das 0001, Henry Hoffmann, Alex Aiken
ICDM3
2025 LogCloud: Fast Search of Compressed Logs on Object Storage
abstract
Large organizations emit terabytes of logs every day in their cloud environment. Efficient data science on these logs via text search is crucial for gleaning operational insights and debugging production outages. Current log management systems either perform full-text indexing on a cluster of dedicated servers to provide efficient search at the expense of high storage cost, or store unindexed compressed logs on object storage at the expense of high search cost. We propose LogCloud, a new object-storage based log management system that supports both cheap compressed log storage and efficient search. LogCloud constructs inverted indices on compressed logs using a novel FM-index implementation that supports efficient querying from object storage directly, removing the need for dedicated indexing servers. Experiments on five public and five production log datasets show that LogCloud can achieve both cheap storage and search, scaling to TB-scale datasets.
Junyu Wei, Alex Aiken, Guangyan Zhang, Jacob Odgård Tørring, Rain Jiang
Proc. VLDB Endow.3
2024 A Model for Query Execution Over Heterogeneous Instances
Emanuel Adamiak, Alex Aiken
CIDR3
2024 Efficient Fault Tolerance for Pipelined Query Engines via Write-ahead Lineage
abstract
Modern distributed pipelined query engines either do not support intra-query fault tolerance or employ high-overhead approaches such as persisting intermediate outputs or checkpointing state. In this work, we present write-ahead lineage, a novel fault recovery technique that combines Spark's lineage-based replay and write-ahead logging. Unlike Spark, where the lineage is determined before query execution, write-ahead lineage persistently logs lineage at runtime to support dynamic task dependencies in pipelined query engines. Since only KB-sized lineages are persisted instead of MB-sized intermediate outputs, the normal execution overhead is minimal compared to spooling or checkpointing based approaches. To ensure fast fault recovery times, tasks only consume intermediate outputs with persisted lineage, preventing global rollbacks upon failure. In addition, lost tasks from different stages can be recovered in a pipelined parallel manner. We implement write-ahead lineage in a distributed pipelined query engine called Quokka. We show that Quokka is around 2x faster than SparkSQL on the TPC-H benchmark with similar fault recovery performance.
Alex Aiken
ICDE2
2020 Redundancy-Free Computation for Graph Neural Networks
abstract
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are based on repeated aggregations of information from nodes' neighbors in a graph. However, because nodes share many neighbors, a naive implementation leads to repeated and inefficient aggregations and represents significant computational overhead. Here we propose Hierarchically Aggregated computation Graphs(HAGs), a new GNN representation technique that explicitly avoids redundancy by managing intermediate aggregation results hierarchically and eliminates repeated computations and unnecessary data transfers in GNN training and inference. HAGs perform the same computations and give the same models/accuracy as traditional GNNs, but in a much shorter time dueto optimized computations. To identify redundant computations,we introduce an accurate cost function and use a novel search algorithm to find optimized HAGs. Experiments show that the HAG representation significantly outperforms the standard GNN by increasing the end-to-end training throughput by up to 2.8× and reducing the aggregations and data transfers in GNN training byup to 6.3× and 5.6×, with only 0.1% memory overhead. Overall,our results represent an important advancement in speeding-up and scaling-up GNNs without any loss in model predictive performance.
Sina Lin, Rex Ying, Jiaxuan You, Jure Leskovec, Alex Aiken
KDD6
2017 A Distributed Multi-GPU System for Fast Graph Processing
abstract
We present Lux, a distributed multi-GPU system that achieves fast graph processing by exploiting the aggregate memory bandwidth of multiple GPUs and taking advantage of locality in the memory hierarchy of multi-GPU clusters. Lux provides two execution models that optimize algorithmic efficiency and enable important GPU optimizations, respectively. Lux also uses a novel dynamic load balancing strategy that is cheap and achieves good load balance across GPUs. In addition, we present a performance model that quantitatively predicts the execution times and automatically selects the runtime configurations for Lux applications. Experiments show that Lux achieves up to 20X speedup over state-of-the-art shared memory systems and up to two orders of magnitude speedup over distributed systems.
Yongkee Kwon, Galen M. Shipman, Patrick S. McCormick, Mattan Erez, Alex Aiken
Proc. VLDB Endow.6
2008 Alert Detection in System Logs
abstract
We present Nodeinfo, an unsupervised algorithm for anomaly detection in system logs. We demonstrate Nodeinfo's effectiveness on data from four of the world's most powerful supercomputers: using logs representing over 746 million processor-hours, in which anomalous events called alerts were manually tagged for scoring, we aim to automatically identify the regions of the log containing those alerts. We formalize the alert detection task in these terms, describe how Nodeinfo uses the information entropy of message terms to identify alerts, and present an online version of this algorithm, which is now in production use. This is the first work to investigate alert detection on (several) publicly-available supercomputer system logs, thereby providing a reproducible performance baseline.
Adam J. Oliner, Alex Aiken, Jon Stearley
ICDM2
2003 Winnowing: Local Algorithms for Document Fingerprinting
abstract
Digital content is for copying: quotation, revision, plagiarism, and file sharing all create copies. Document fingerprinting is concerned with accurately identifying copying, including small partial copies, within large sets of documents.We introduce the class of local document fingerprinting algorithms, which seems to capture an essential property of any finger-printing technique guaranteed to detect copies. We prove a novel lower bound on the performance of any local algorithm. We also develop winnowing, an efficient local fingerprinting algorithm, and show that winnowing's performance is within 33% of the lower bound. Finally, we also give experimental results on Web data, and report experience with MOSS, a widely-used plagiarism detection service.
Saul Schleimer, Daniel Shawcross Wilkerson, Alex Aiken
SIGMOD Conference3
1998 DataSplash
abstract
Database visualization is an area of growing importance as database systems become larger and more accessible. DataSplash is an easy-to-use, integrated environment for navigating, creating, and querying visual representations of data. We will demonstrate the three main components which make up the DataSplash environment: a navigation system, a direct-manipulation interface for creating and modifying visualizations, and a direct-manipulation visual query system.
Christopher Olston, Allison Woodruff, Alex Aiken, Michael Chu, Vuk Ercegovac, Mark Lin, Mybrid Spalding, Michael Stonebraker
SIGMOD Conference3
1996 Tioga-2: A Direct Manipulation Database Visualization Environment
abstract
The paper reports on user experience with Tioga, a DBMS centric visualization tool developed at Berkeley. Based on this experience, we have designed Tioga-2 as a direct manipulation system that is more powerful and much easier to program. A detailed design of the revised system is presented, together with an extensive example of its application.
Alex Aiken, Jolly Chen, Michael Stonebraker, Allison Woodruff
ICDE1
1995 Static Analysis Techniques for Predicting the Behavior of Active Database Rules
abstract
This article gives methods for statically analyzing sets of active database rules to determine if the rules are (1) guaranteed to terminate, (2) guaranteed to produce a unique final database state, and (3) guaranteed to produce a unique stream of observable actions. If the analysis determines that one of these properties is not guaranteed, it isolates the rules responsible for the problem and determines criteria that, if satisfied, guarantee the property. The analysis methods are presented in the context of the Starburst Rule System .
Alex Aiken, Joseph M. Hellerstein, Jennifer Widom
ACM Trans. Database Syst.1
1992 Behavior of Database Production Rules: Termination, Confluence, and Observable Determinism
abstract
Static analysis methods are given for determining whether arbitrary sets of database production rules are (1) guaranteed to terminate; (2) guaranteed to produce a unique final database state; (3) guaranteed to produce a unique stream of observable actions. When the analysis determines that one of these properties is not guaranteed, it isolates the rules responsible for the problem and determines criteria that, if satisfied, guarantee the property. The analysis methods are presented in the context of the Starburst Rule System; they will form the basis of an interactive development environment for Starburst rule programmers.
Alex Aiken, Jennifer Widom, Joseph M. Hellerstein
SIGMOD Conference1