Easy-to-use programming interfaces paired with cloud-scale processing engines have enabled big data system users to author arbitrarily complex analytical jobs over massive volumes of data. However, as the complexity and scale of analytical jobs increase,...

Given a set V, the problem of unconstrained submodular maximization with modular costs (USM-MC) asks for a subset S ⊆ V that maximizes f(S) - c(S), where f is a non-negative, monotone, and submodular function that gauges the utility of S, and c is a non-...

Large-scale real-world graphs are known to have highly skewed vertex degree distribution and highly skewed edge weight distribution. Existing vertex-centric iterative graph computation models suffer from a number of serious problems: (1) poor performance ...

Computing distances among data points is an essential part of many important algorithms in data analytics, graph analysis, and other domains. In each of these domains, developers have spent significant manual effort optimizing algorithms, often through ...

Almost by definition, optimization is a source of a tremendous power for automatically improving processes, decisions, products and services. But its potential is still largely unexploited in most real-world contexts. One of the main reasons blocking its ...

Given a parametrized n-dimensional SQL query template and a choice of query optimizer, a plan diagram is a color-coded pictorial enumeration of the execution plan choices of the optimizer over the query parameter space. These diagrams have proved to be a ...

The diversity and large volumes of data processed in the Natural Sciences today has led to a proliferation of highly-specialized and autonomous scientific databases with inherent and often intricate relationships. As a user-friendly method for querying ...