There is still time to register for CIDR 2026 in Santa Cruz! If you need a roommate for the conference, there is also a spreadsheet you can use to find someone! www.cidrdb.org/cidr2026/reg...
why i pay for the verge
I Want You to Understand Chicago Politics Chicago 2025-11-08 I want you to understand what it is like to live in Chicago during this time. Every day my phone buzzes. It is a neighborhood group: four people were kidnapped at the corner drugstore. A friend a mile away sends a Slack message: she was at the scene when masked men assaulted and abducted two people on the street. A plumber working on my pipes is distraught, and I find out that two of his employees were kidnapped that morning. A week later it happens again. An email arrives. Agents with guns have chased a teacher into the school where she works. They did not have a warrant. They dragged her away, ignoring her and her colleagues’ pleas to show proof of her documentation. That evening I stand a few feet from the parents of Rayito de Sol and listen to them describe, with anguish, how good Ms. Diana was to their children. What it is like to have strangers with guns traumatize your kids. For a teacher to hide a three-year-old child for fear they might be killed. How their relatives will no longer leave the house. I hear the pain and fury in their voices, and I wonder who will be next. Understand what it is to pray in Chicago. On September 19th, Reverend David Black, lead pastor at First Presbyterian Church of Chicago, was praying outside the ICE detention center in Broadview when a DHS agent shot him in the head with pepper balls. Pepper balls are never supposed to be fired at the head because they can seriously injure, or even kill. “We could hear them laughing as they were shooting us from the roof,” Black recalled. He is not the only member of the clergy ICE has assaulted. Methodist pastor Hannah Kardon was violently arrested on October 17th, and Baptist pastor Michael Woolf was shot with pepper balls on November 1st. Understand what it is to sleep in Chicago. On the night of September 30th, federal agents rappelled from a Black Hawk helicopter to execute a raid on an apartment building on the South Sho…
Kyle Kingsbury is not a journalist. He is not an op-ed writer.
He is a computer safety researcher.
And he has written one of the most compelling, comprehensive accounts of the ongoing hell in Chicago that you could possibly imagine.
In under 1600 words.
aphyr.com/posts/397-i-...
I agree as a unit of progress. But it is still integral as a mechanism to learn how to organize thoughts and arguments, and communicate effectively.
As an academic who has named papers after the classic mortal kombat ninjas (eugenewu.net/ninjas.html), I am obligated to share that the new Mortal Kombat II trailer IS AMAZING!
www.youtube.com/watch?v=a9pH...
6/ Got takes?
📩 DM us or email ewu@cs.columbia.edu/raulcf@uchicago.edu
#SIGMOD2025 #VLDB2025 #databases #AI #academicresearch #CSResearch
5/ 📄 Full writeup: wp.sigmod.org?p=3828
🎤 VLDB 2025 sequel panel is coming—with new voices and deeper focus on trade-offs: Shreya Shankar, Gustavo Alonso, Natacha Crooks, Jiannan Wang & Divesh Srivastava.
4/ Panelists’ spicy ideas: 🌶️
• 8 page SIGMOD papers + a YouTube explainer
• More industry internships to understand "the real world"
• Host “Data + X” workshops in other fields—NOT at SIGMOD
3/ Academia enables “research as play.”
• But how do we balance that with:
• Real funding constraints
• Recruiting top students
• But how to compete with 600-person industry teams? By picking the right problems
2/ DB folks still have a massive edge:
• Declarative thinking
• Separation of logical + physical
• Deep systems chops
• But we’re not always in the rooms where AI decisions are made. That needs to change.
1/ Where does *academic* database research go from here—in a world dominated by AI, $100B in private investment, and an NSF budget cut in half? Where should focus go?
At SIGMOD 2025, we hosted a panel to discuss, summarized on the SIGMOD blog: wp.sigmod.org?p=3828
🧵 Key takeaways from the panel:
Last but not least, the first workshop on data management, process mining, and LLMs! The founder of process mining, Wil van der Aals, as well as Ernesto Damiani, gave exciting keynotes. dbpmworkshop.github.io
Along with Raul Castro Fernandez, I also co-organized a lively SIGMOD panel exploring the future of academic database research.
I was delighted to deliver a keynote "A Decade of Systems for Human Data Interaction" at HILDA Workshop. I argue that HILDA is about providing guarantees for **user-facing experiences** -- critical to support the rise of vibe coding and LLMs that are eating UX.
Physical Visualization Design by Yiru Chen et al., lets interface designers focus purely on the visual experience and user interaction of visualization interfaces. PVD automatically assesses if a design can meet interactivity goals synthesizes the client-server architecture to deploy it.
Haneen had a strong presence at ProvWeek: high-performance lineage compression and an in-depth comparison of capture methods. She demo'd FADE, which runs >1M what-if qs/sec in DuckDB to power interactive what-if analytics. It's a DuckDB extension! github.com/haneensa/lin...
Highlights:
John and Luis received the 10-year Test-of-Time Award for their 2015 paper k-shape
Lampros, myself, & friends at Celonis won DEEM Best Paper for Hierarchical Text Segmentation using LLMs & Best Industry Demo for semantic taxonomy-driven prompt optimization.
Columbia's Data Management Group just wrapped up @sigmod2025.bsky.social with a strong showing: 4 papers, 2 demos, a keynote, a tutorial, and a panel. Highlights include a test-of-time award, best paper at DEEM, and best industry demo awards!
A full write up is at: eugenewu.net/general/2025...
The US government is aiming to get rid of a quarter million people involved in science research and education by 2026.
I have no words.
software craftsmanship in action.
Working on HILDA@sigmod2025.bsky.social keynote slides. Thinking about human data interaction, AI, and a virtuous cycle. Looking forward to seeing folks in a week!
yes! the tldr is compute sufficient statistics for the desired model for each distinct value of a candidate join key. The provider or an LLM identifies join keys offline. arxiv.org/abs/2305.10419
Making use of existing structured data is super valuable but still an open question. We've been working on closing the loop on table search in large data repos for a while now. The key is to search via the data task rather than keywords or a table
Overview slides: www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/unpng...
the following 30 seconds from perfect movie REAL GENIUS are a rock solid vision of the future of education youtu.be/wB1X4o-MV6o?...
Almost every db faculty that has received an nsf award ad benefitrd from hector and sylvia’s work. Well deserved!
Go columbia db! Congrats to luis and papa john!
Since you are making assumptions about what the reader knows (axes, weird encodings), then if you also assume the reader is already familiar with the points, show an empty image. 1:0
Could not have been clearer about this www.theverge.com/24282022/kam...
