Business intelligence (BI) transforms large volumes of data within modern organizations into actionable insights for informed decision-making. Recently, large language model (LLM)-based agents have streamlined the BI workflow by automatically performing task planning, reasoning, and actions in executable environments based on natural language (NL) queries. However, existing approaches primarily focus on individual BI tasks such as NL2SQL and NL2VIS. The fragmentation of tasks across different data roles and tools lead to inefficiencies and potential errors due to the iterative and collaborative nature of BI. In this paper, we introduce DataLab, a unified BI platform that integrates a one-stop LLM-based agent framework with an augmented computational notebook interface. DataLab supports various BI tasks for different data roles in data preparation, analysis, and visualization by seamlessly combining LLM assistance with user customization within a single environment. To achieve this unification, we design a domain knowledge incorporation module tailored for enterprise-specific BI tasks, an inter-agent communication mechanism to facilitate information sharing across the BI workflow, and a cell-based context management strategy to enhance context utilization efficiency in BI notebooks. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DataLab achieves state-of-the-art performance on various BI tasks across popular research benchmarks. Moreover, DataLab maintains high effectiveness and efficiency on real-world datasets from Tencent, achieving up to a 58.58% increase in accuracy and a 61.65 % reduction in token cost on enterprise-specific BI tasks.

Indexes play a pivotal role in enhancing database performance. However, index selection remains one of the most challenging problems in relational database management systems, as it demands a careful equilibrium: the search procedure needs to efficiently navigate through a multitude of potential configu-rations, while the evaluation method needs to precisely assess the performance impact of index configurations. Specifically, prohibitively high costs can arise from frequent index creation and workload execution for evaluation, whereas over-reliance on cost estimations can yield suboptimal performance due to potential inaccuracies. In this paper, we present a multi-fidelity index advisor, MFIX, designed to reconcile search efficiency and solution quality. To balance evaluation accuracy and efficiency, MFIX coordinates a range of low-fidelity cost estimates as cheap-to-evaluate ap-proximations, with a select few precise high-fidelity workload executions for refinement. To optimize search efficiency, MFIX employs a data-efficient Bayesian optimization method, paired with a condensed tree-structured index space that eliminates redundant configurations. Furthermore, MFIX incorporates his-torical tasks as auxiliary information with variable fidelity, using an adaptive weighting mechanism that considers task similarity to expedite the search process. Extensive experiments with diverse analytical workloads show that MFIX consistently out-performs state-of-the-art single-fidelity methods, achieving up to a 10.2% increase in performance improvement in actual execution cost over the leading estimation-based approach. Furthermore, through its multi-fidelity Bayesian optimization over conditional space, MFIX significantly enhances the search efficiency and ensures a sustainable search cost.

Recently using machine learning (ML) based techniques to optimize the performance of modern database management systems (DBMSs) has attracted intensive interest from both industry and academia. With an objective to tune a specific component of a DBMS (e.g., index selection, knobs tuning), the ML-based tuning agents have shown to be able to find better configurations than experienced database administrators (DBAs). However, one critical yet challenging question remains unexplored -- how to make those ML-based tuning agents work collaboratively. Existing methods do not consider the dependencies among the multiple agents, and the model used by each agent only studies the effect of changing the configurations in a single component. To tune different components for DBMS, a coordinating mechanism is needed to make the multiple agents be cognizant of each other. Also, we need to decide how to allocate the limited tuning budget (e.g., time and resources) among the agents to maximize the performance. Such a decision is difficult to make since the distribution of the reward (i.e., performance improvement) corresponding to each agent is unknown and non-stationary. In this paper, we study the above question and present a unified coordinating framework to efficiently utilize existing ML-based agents. First, we propose a message propagation protocol that specifies the collaboration behaviors for agents and encapsulates the global tuning messages in each agent's model. Second, we combine Thompson Sampling, a well-studied reinforcement learning algorithm with a memory buffer so that our framework can allocate the tuning budget judiciously in a non-stationary environment. Our framework defines the interfaces adapted to a broad class of ML-based tuning agents, yet simple enough for integration with existing implementations and future extensions. Based on extensive evaluations, we show that this framework can effectively utilize different ML-based agents and find better configurations with 1.4~14.1x speedups on the workload execution time compared with baselines.

As a natural interaction approach, handwriting acts as an essential role in human–computer interaction. In order to achieve ubiquitous and reliable applications, a handwriting recognition system should be easy to use without any intrusion and robust to environment changes, which cannot be satisfied in most of existing approaches. In this article, we presentRFPad, a device-free handwriting recognition system with a tag square consisting of four low-cost passive radio frequency identification (RFID) tags. With such an ingenious tag square, we transform the flat surface into a handwriting platform, and build a geometry-based theoretical model between the finger positions and the tags' phase variations so that the finger trajectory can be accurately tracked and handwriting can be recognized with the phases segmented from continuous signals. We implement a prototype ofRFPadusing commercial off-the-shelf RFID devices and conduct extensive experiments to evaluate its performance. Experiment results show that ourRFPadcan track finger movement with an average error of 1 cm and achieve average recognition accuracy of 94.08$\%$for all 26 handwriting capital letters.

Recently, using automatic configuration tuning to improve the performance of modern database management systems (DBMSs) has attracted increasing interest from the database community. This is embodied with a number of systems featuring advanced tuning capabilities being developed. However, it remains a challenge to select the best solution for database configuration tuning, considering the large body of algorithm choices. In addition, beyond the applications on database systems, we could find more potential algorithms designed for configuration tuning. To this end, this paper provides a comprehensive evaluation of configuration tuning techniques from a broader perspective, hoping to better benefit the database community. In particular, we summarize three key modules of database configuration tuning systems and conduct extensive ablation studies using various challenging cases. Our evaluation demonstrates that the hyper-parameter optimization algorithms can be borrowed to further enhance the database configuration tuning. Moreover, we identify the best algorithm choices for different modules. Beyond the comprehensive evaluations, we offer an efficient and unified database configuration tuning benchmark via surrogates that reduces the evaluation cost to a minimum, allowing for extensive runs and analysis of new techniques.

Biometric sensing has become a widely concerned authentication technology. Existing image-based methods are susceptible to light conditions and have privacy exposure risks, while contact authentication methods are not conducive to epidemic prevention requirements in public places. In this article, we propose a palmprint-based identification system by collecting backscattered signals of the inaudible acoustic signals, namely AcoPalm. AcoPalm does not require special hardware and contact operation for user authentication. First, frequency modulated continuous wave (FMCW) on acoustic signals are designed to extract static contours and palmprint changes and to model the unique biological characteristics of the individual palm. Second, a palmprint authentication model based on PENN is proposed to achieve high-precision multiuser authentication without mass training data. Finally, the system performance is evaluated in multiple smartphones and three scenarios. The experimental results show that AcoPalm can resist replay attack and imitation attack, and the authentication accuracy can reach 96.22%. Furthermore, AcoPalm achieves satisfactory experience in availability and practicality.

Modern database management systems (DBMS) contain tens to hundreds of critical performance tuning knobs that determine the system runtime behaviors. To reduce the total cost of ownership, cloud database providers put in drastic effort to automatically optimize the resource utilization by tuning these knobs. There are two challenges. First, the tuning system should always abide by the service level agreement (SLA) while optimizing the resource utilization, which imposes strict constrains on the tuning process. Second, the tuning time should be reasonably acceptable since time-consuming tuning is not practical for production and online troubleshooting.