Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
XDB in Action: Decentralized Cross-Database Query Processing for Black-Box DBMSes

Data are naturally produced at different locations and hence stored on different DBMSes. To maximize the value of the collected data, today's users combine data from different sources. Research in data integration has proposed the Mediator-Wrapper (MW) architecture to enable ad-hoc querying processing over multiple sources. The MW approach is desirable for users, as they do not need to deal with heterogeneous data sources. However, from a query processing perspective, the MW approach is inefficient: First, one needs to provision the mediating execution engine with resources. Second, during query processing, data gets "centralized" within the mediating engine, which causes redundant data movement. Recently, we proposed in-situ cross-database query processing , a paradigm for federated query processing without a mediating engine. Our approach optimizes runtime performance and reduces data movement by leveraging existing systems, eliminating the need for an additional federated query engine. In this demonstration, we showcase XDB, our prototype for in-situ cross-database query processing. We demonstrate several aspects of XDB, i.e. the cross-database environment, our optimization techniques, and its decentralized execution phase.
mlwhatif: What If You Could Stop Re-Implementing Your Machine Learning Pipeline Analyses over and over?

Software systems that learn from data with machine learning (ML) are used in critical decision-making processes. Unfortunately, real-world experience shows that the pipelines for data preparation, feature encoding and model training in ML systems are often brittle with respect to their input data. As a consequence, data scientists have to run different kinds of data centric what-if analyses to evaluate the robustness and reliability of such pipelines, e.g., with respect to data errors or preprocessing techniques. These what-if analyses follow a common pattern: they take an existing ML pipeline, create a pipeline variant by introducing a small change, and execute this variant to see how the change impacts the pipeline's output score. We recently proposed mlwhatif, a library that enables data scientists to declaratively specify what-if analyses for an ML pipeline, and to automatically generate, optimize and execute the required pipeline variants. We demonstrate how data scientists can leverage mlwhatif for a variety of pipelines and three different what-if analyses focusing on the robustness of a pipeline against data errors, the impact of data cleaning operations, and the impact of data preprocessing operations on fairness. In particular, we demonstrate step-by-step how mlwhatif generates and optimizes the required execution plans for the pipeline analyses. Our library is publicly available at https://github.com/stefan-grafberger/mlwhatif.
TPCx-AI - An Industry Standard Benchmark for Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning Systems

Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) techniques have existed for years, but new hardware trends and advances in model training and inference have radically improved their performance. With an ever increasing amount of algorithms, systems, and hardware solutions, it is challenging to identify good deployments even for experts. Researchers and industry experts have observed this challenge and have created several benchmark suites for AI and ML applications and systems. While they are helpful in comparing several aspects of AI applications, none of the existing benchmarks measures end-to-end performance of ML deployments. Many have been rigorously developed in collaboration between academia and industry, but no existing benchmark is standardized. In this paper, we introduce the TPC Express Benchmark for Artificial Intelligence (TPCx-AI), the first industry standard benchmark for end-to-end machine learning deployments. TPCx-AI is the first AI benchmark that represents the pipelines typically found in common ML and AI workloads. TPCx-AI provides a full software kit, which includes data generator, driver, and two full workload implementations, one based on Python libraries and one based on Apache Spark. We describe the complete benchmark and show benchmark results for various scale factors. TPCx-AI's core contributions are a novel unified data set covering structured and unstructured data; a fully scalable data generator that can generate realistic data from GB up to PB scale; and a diverse and representative workload using different data types and algorithms, covering a wide range of aspects of real ML workloads such as data integration, data processing, training, and inference.
Fanglue: An Interactive System for Decision Rule Crafting

In many applications the training data do not always contain sufficient information to produce high-quality decision rules for standard (end-to-end) rule mining algorithms, and human experts have to incorporate domain knowledge during rule induction in order to get meaningful results. In this work we present Fanglue, a home-grown system inside Alipay, for interactive decision rule crafting. Fanglue is a distributed in-memory system and is highly responsive when processing large-scale datasets. In addition, Fanglue extends the standard representation of a decision rule by introducing disjunctive clauses. Having disjunctive clauses can improve the coverage and robustness of a decision rule, especially for fraud prevention in Fintech applications.
Taurus MM: Bringing Multi-Master to the Cloud

A single-master database has limited update capacity because a single node handles all updates. A multi-master database potentially has higher update capacity because the load is spread across multiple nodes. However, the need to coordinate updates and ensure durability can generate high network traffic. Reducing network load is particularly important in a cloud environment where the network infrastructure is shared among thousands of tenants. In this paper, we present Taurus MM, a shared-storage multi-master database optimized for cloud environments. It implements two novel algorithms aimed at reducing network traffic plus a number of additional optimizations. The first algorithm is a new type of distributed clock that combines the small size of Lamport clocks with the effective support of distributed snapshots of vector clocks. The second algorithm is a new hybrid page and row locking protocol that significantly reduces the number of lock requests sent over the network. Experimental results on a cluster with up to eight masters demonstrate superior performance compared to Aurora multi-master and CockroachDB.
Angel-PTM: A Scalable and Economical Large-Scale Pre-Training System in Tencent

Recent years have witnessed the unprecedented achievements of large-scale pre-trained models, especially Transformer models. Many products and services in Tencent Inc., such as WeChat, QQ, and Tencent Advertisement, have been opted in to gain the power of pre-trained models. In this work, we present Angel-PTM, a productive deep learning system designed for pre-training and fine-tuning Transformer models. Angel-PTM can train extremely large-scale models with hierarchical memory efficiently. The key designs of Angel-PTM are a fine-grained memory management via the Page abstraction and a unified scheduling method that coordinates computations, data movements, and communications. Furthermore, Angel-PTM supports extreme model scaling with SSD storage and implements a lock-free updating mechanism to address the SSD I/O bottlenecks. Experimental results demonstrate that Angel-PTM outperforms existing systems by up to 114.8% in terms of maximum model scale as well as up to 88.9% in terms of training throughput. Additionally, experiments on GPT3-175B and T5-MoE-1.2T models utilizing hundreds of GPUs verify our strong scalability.
Interactive Demonstration of EVA

In this demonstration, we will present EVA, an end-to-end AI-Relational database management system. We will demonstrate the capabilities and utility of EVA using three usage scenarios: (1) EVA serves as a backend for an exploratory video analytics interface developed using Streamlit and React, (2) EVA seamlessly integrates with the Python and Data Science ecosystems by allowing users to access EVA in a Python notebook alongside other popular libraries such as Pandas and Matplotlib, and (3) EVA facilitates bulk labeling with Label Studio, a widely-used labeling framework. By optimizing complex vision queries, we illustrate how EVA allows a wide range of application developers to harness the recent advances in computer vision.
OceanBase Paetica: A Hybrid Shared-Nothing/Shared-Everything Database for Supporting Single Machine and Distributed Cluster

In the ongoing evolution of the OceanBase database system, it is essential to enhance its adaptability to small-scale enterprises. The OceanBase database system has demonstrated its stability and effectiveness within the Ant Group and other commercial organizations, besides through the TPC-C and TPC-H tests. In this paper, we have designed a stand-alone and distributed integrated architecture named Paetica to address the overhead caused by the distributed components in the stand-alone mode, with respect to the OceanBase system. Paetica enables adaptive configuration of the database that allows OceanBase to support both serial and parallel executions in stand-alone and distributed scenarios, thus providing efficiency and economy. This design has been implemented in version 4.0 of the OceanBase system, and the experiments show that Paetica exhibits notable scalability and outperforms alternative stand-alone or distributed databases. Furthermore, it enables the transition of OceanBase from primarily serving large enterprises to truly catering to small and medium enterprises, by employing a single OceanBase database for the successive stages of enterprise or business development, without the requirement for migration. Our experiments confirm that Paetica has achieved linear scalability with the increasing CPU core number within the stand-alone mode. It also outperforms MySQL and Greenplum in the Sysbench and TPC-H evaluations.
Private Information Retrieval in Large Scale Public Data Repositories

The tutorial focuses on Private Information Retrieval (PIR), which allows clients to privately query public or server-owned databases without disclosing their queries. The tutorial covers the basic concepts of PIR such as its types, construction, and critical building blocks, including homomorphic encryption. It also discusses the performance of PIR, existing optimizations for scalability, real-life applications of PIR, and ways to extend its functionalities.
Social Perspective on Cell Phone Use in Bangladesh from 2000 to 2023 and future 2023 to 2030

Cell phone use has become a ubiquitous and influential phenomenon in Bangladesh, affecting various aspects of social life. This paper aims to explore the social perspective on cell phone use in Bangladesh from 2000 to 2023, based on the existing academic papers on this topic. The paper covers the following aspects: the evolution of cell phone penetration and usage in Bangladesh, the impact of cell phone use on social capital and social cohesion, the impact of cell phone use on student learning, and the role of mobile phone use and social media engagement among adolescents. The paper also presents some future possibilities for cell phone use and its social impact in Bangladesh from 2023 to 2030, based on some possible scenarios and implications. The paper concludes with some recommendations for policy makers, practitioners, researchers, and users.
Breast cancer classification using hybrid deep neural networks: staging and grading of cancer

Breast cancer is responsible for the deaths of hundreds of women every year. The manual identification of breast cancer has more difficulties, and have the possibility of error. Many imaging approaches are being researched for their potential to identify breast cancer (BC). Incorrect identification might sometimes result in unneeded therapy and diagnosis. Because of this, accurate identification of breast cancer may save a great number of patients from needing unneeded surgery and biopsies. Deep learning’s (DL) performance in the processing of medical images has substantially increased as a result of recent breakthroughs in the sector. Because of their improved capacity to anticipate outcomes, deep learning algorithms are able to reliably detect BC from ultrasound pictures. Transfer learning is a kind of machine learning that reuses knowledge representations from public models that were built with the use of large-scale datasets. Transfer learning has been shown to often result in overfitting. The primary purpose of this research is to develop and provide suggestions for a deep learning model that is effective and reliable in the detection and classification of breast cancer. A tissue biopsy is obtained from the suspicious region in order to ascertain the nature of a breast tumor and whether or not it is cancerous. Tumors may take any of these forms. When the images have been reconstructed with the help of a variational autoencoder (VAE) and a denoising variational autoencoder (DVAE), a convolutional neural network (CNN) model is used. This will be the case because it opens up a new area of the field to be investigated. The histological subtypes of breast cancer are used in conjunction with the degree of differentiation to execute the task of breast cancer categorization.
Runtime verification of self-adaptive multi-agent system using probabilistic timed automata

The self-adaptive multi-agent system requires adaptive adjustments based on the dynamic environment during its runtime. Heterogeneous agent can accomplish different task goals, enhance the efficiency of system operation, but its complex collaboration problem poses new challenges to the study of verification of adaptive policies for heterogeneous multi-agents. This paper proposes a runtime verification method for self-adaptive multi-agent systems using probabilistic timed automata. The method constructs a probabilistic timed automaton model by formally describing the functional characteristics of heterogeneous agents and integrating random factors in the environment to simulate the operation process of the self-adaptive multi-agent system. Regarding the collaboration logic among heterogeneous agents, security constraints are established to ensure the security of state transition processes during system operation. Combining model checking with runtime quantitative verification methods to conduct experiment and applying it in the case of an intelligent unmanned parking system. Experimental results manifest the correctness of the cooperation logic between agents can effectively ensure the stability of the system at runtime. Significant improvement in system uptime and efficiency compared to the initial system without runtime quantitative validation.
Cross-modality semantic guidance for multi-label image classification

Multi-label image classification aims to predict a set of labels that are present in an image. The key challenge of multi-label image classification lies in two aspects: modeling label correlations and utilizing spatial information. However, the existing approaches mainly calculate the correlation between labels according to co-occurrence among them. While the result is easily affected by the label noise and occasional co-occurrences. In addition, some works try to model the correlation between labels and spatial features, but the correlation among labels is not fully considered to model the spatial relationships among features. To address the above issues, we propose a novel cross-modality semantic guidance-based framework for multi-label image classification, namely CMSG. First, we design a semantic-guided attention (SGA) module, which applies the label correlation matrix to guide the learning of class-specific features, which implicitly models semantic correlations among labels. Second, we design a spatial-aware attention (SAA) module to extract high-level semantic-aware spatial features based on class-specific features obtained from the SGA module. The experiments carried out on three benchmark datasets demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms existing state-of-the-art algorithms on multi-label image classification.
A novel subspace outlier detection method by entropy-based clustering algorithm

Subspace outlier detection has emerged as a practical approach for outlier detection. Classical full space outlier detection methods become ineffective in high dimensional data due to the "curse of dimensionality". Subspace outlier detection methods have great potential to overcome the problem. However, the challenge becomes how to determine which subspaces to be used for outlier detection among a huge number of all subspaces. In this paper, firstly, we propose an intuitive definition of outliers in subspaces. We study the desirable properties of subspaces for outlier detection and investigate the metrics for those properties. Then, a novel subspace outlier detection algorithm with a statistical foundation is proposed. Our method selectively leverages a limited set of the most interesting subspaces for outlier detection. Through experimental validation, we demonstrate that identifying outliers within this reduced set of highly interesting subspaces yields significantly higher accuracy compared to analyzing the entire feature space. We show by experiments that the proposed method outperforms competing subspace outlier detection approaches on real world data sets.
Anser: Adaptive Information Sharing Framework of AnalyticDB

The surge in data analytics has fostered burgeoning demand for AnalyticDB on Alibaba Cloud, which has well served thousands of customers from various business sectors. The most notable feature is the diversity of the workloads it handles, including batch processing, real-time data analytics, and unstructured data analytics. To improve the overall performance for such diverse workloads, one of the major challenges is to optimize long-running complex queries without sacrificing the processing efficiency of short-running interactive queries. While existing methods attempt to utilize runtime dynamic statistics for adaptive query processing, they often focus on specific scenarios instead of providing a holistic solution. To address this challenge, we propose a new framework called Anser , which enhances the design of traditional distributed data warehouses by embedding a new information sharing mechanism. This allows for the efficient management of the production and consumption of various dynamic information across the system. Building on top of Anser , we introduce a novel scheduling policy that optimizes both data and information exchanges within the physical plan, enabling the acceleration of complex analytical queries without sacrificing the performance of short-running interactive queries. We conduct comprehensive experiments over public and in-house workloads to demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our proposed information sharing framework.
Natural Language Interfaces for Databases with Deep Learning

In the age of the Digital Revolution, almost all human activities, from industrial and business operations to medical and academic research, are reliant on the constant integration and utilisation of ever-increasing volumes of data. However, the explosive volume and complexity of data makes data querying and exploration challenging even for experts, and makes the need to democratise the access to data, even for non-technical users, all the more evident. It is time to lift all technical barriers, by empowering users to access relational databases through conversation. We consider 3 main research areas that a natural language data interface is based on: Text-to-SQL, SQL-to-Text, and Data-to-Text. The purpose of this tutorial is a deep dive into these areas, covering state-of-the-art techniques and models, and explaining how the progress in the deep learning field has led to impressive advancements. We will present benchmarks that sparked research and competition, and discuss open problems and research opportunities with one of the most important challenges being the integration of these 3 research areas into one conversational system.
PolarDB-SCC: A Cloud-Native Database Ensuring Low Latency for Strongly Consistent Reads

A classic design of cloud-native databases adopts an architecture that consists of one read/write (RW) node and one or more read-only (RO) nodes. In such a design, the propagation of write-ahead logs (WALs) from the RW node to the RO node(s) is typically performed asynchronously. Consequently, system designers either have to accept a loose consistency guarantee, where a read from the RO node may return stale data, or tolerate significant performance degradation in terms of read latency, as it then needs to wait for the log to be propagated and applied. Most commercial cloud-native databases, such as Amazon Aurora, choose performance over strong consistency. As a result, it makes RO nodes useless for many applications requiring read-after-write consistency (a form of strong consistency), and the support for serverless databases (i.e., allowing the RO nodes to be scaled out automatically) is impossible as they require a single endpoint. This paper proposes PolarDB-SCC (PolarDB-Strongly Consistent Cluster), a cloud-native database architecture that guarantees strongly consistent reads with very low latency. The core idea is to eliminate unnecessary waits and reduce the necessary wait time on RO nodes while still supporting strong consistency. To achieve this, it tracks the RW node's modification timestamp at three progressively finer-grained levels. We further design a Linear Lamport timestamp to reduce the RO node's timestamp fetching operations and leverage the RDMA network for all the data transferring ( e.g. , timestamp fetching and log shipment) to minimize network overhead and extra CPU usage. Our evaluation shows that PolarDB-SCC does not incur any noticeable overhead for ensuring strongly consistent reads compared with the eventually consistent (stale) read policy. To the best of our knowledge, PolarDB-SCC is the first "read-write splitting" cloud-native database that supports strongly consistent read with negligible overhead. Compared with a straightforward read-wait design, PolarDB-SCC improves throughput by up to 4.51× and reduces median latency by up to 3.66× in SysBench's read-write workload. PolarDB-SCC is already commercially available at Alibaba Cloud.
Eigen: End-to-End Resource Optimization for Large-Scale Databases on the Cloud

Increasingly, cloud database vendors host large-scale geographically distributed clusters to provide cloud database services. When managing the clusters, we observe that it is challenging to simultaneously maximizing the resource allocation ratio and resource availability. This problem becomes more severe in modern cloud database clusters, where resource allocations occur more frequently and on a greater scale. To improve the resource allocation ratio without hurting resource availability, we introduce Eigen, a large-scale cloud-native cluster management system for large-scale databases on the cloud. Based on a resource flow model, we propose a hierarchical resource management system and three resource optimization algorithms that enable end-to-end resource optimization. Furthermore, we demonstrate the system optimization that promotes user experience by reducing scheduling latencies and improving scheduling throughput. Eigen has been launched in a large-scale public-cloud production environment for 30+ months and served more than 30+ regions (100+ available zones) globally. Based on the evaluation of real-world clusters and simulated experiments, Eigen can improve the allocation ratio by over 27% (from 60% to 87.0%) on average, while the ratio of delayed resource provisions is under 0.1%.