Arun Kumar Assistant Professor Computer Science and Engineering and Halicioglu Data Science Institute University of California, San Diego Email: arunkk [at] eng [dot] ucsd [dot] edu Office: 3218 EBU3B (CSE building)

Bio

Arun Kumar is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering and the Halicioglu Data Science Institute at the University of California, San Diego. He is a member of the Database Lab and Center for Networked Systems and an affiliate member of the AI Group. His primary research interests are in data management and systems for machine learning/artificial intelligence-based data analytics. Systems and ideas based on his research have been released as part of the Apache MADlib open-source library, shipped as part of products from Cloudera, IBM, Oracle, and Pivotal, and used internally by Facebook, Google, LogicBlox, Microsoft, and other companies. He is a recipient of two SIGMOD research paper awards, a SIGMOD Research Highlight Award, three distinguished reviewer awards from SIGMOD/VLDB, the PhD dissertation award from UW-Madison CS, the IEEE TCDE Rising Star Award, an NSF CAREER Award, a Hellman Fellowship, a UCSD oSTEM Faculty of the Year Award, and research award gifts from Amazon, Google, Oracle, and VMware.

Curriculum Vitae | Research Blog | On Twitter | On Tumblr

Recent News

• New! 3/21: Honored to be accorded the IEEE TCDE Rising Star Award! A special recognition I will cherish. Award acceptance talk: Video and Slides PDF.

• New! 3/21: A big thank you to Amazon AI for supporting our work on SortingHat with an Amazon Research Award!

• New! 3/21: The first full research paper on SortingHat is accepted to SIGMOD 2021! This is likely the first research paper in SIGMOD's history focused primarily on a new benchmark dataset. War is coming to ML platforms / AutoML land!

• 2/21: A big thank you to VMware for supporting our work on Cerebro with a second faculty research award gift, generously tripling their support!

• 2/21: I have launched a new Tumblr page for fun posts on research, practice, and education in the world of systems for data management, analytics, ML, and data science.

• 1/21: Congrats to my undergraduate advisees, Advitya and Kabir, and PhD student, Side, for being selected for the second round of the SIGMOD 2021 Student Research Competition! It is pretty rare for three submissions from a single group to all get selected.

• 12/20: Congrats to my undergraduate advisee, Kabir, on receiving an Honorable Mention for the CRA Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher Award! Kabir is in the PhD applicant pool for the 2020-21 cycle.

My current research focuses on the foundations of advanced data analytics systems that help make the process of building and deploying ML/AI-powered data analytics applications easier (improving the productivity of data scientists and ML/software engineers) and faster (improving runtime performance and introducing accuracy trade-offs). Thus, the key themes of my research are usability, developability, performance, and scalability. I enjoy working on problems that are motivated by real applications and are formally grounded. I also enjoy insightful conversations with practitioners on the frontlines of data analytics.

More details about my research are available on my research group webpage, including current projects, and all of our publications.

• CSE 132C (formerly CSE 190): Database System Implementation: Spring 2021, Spring 2020, Spring 2019, Spring 2018, Spring 2017

• CSE 232A: Graduate Database Systems: Fall 2019, Fall 2018

• DSC 102: Systems for Scalable Analytics: Winter 2021, Winter 2020

• CSE 291/234: Data Systems for Machine Learning (new version of my former CSE 291): Fall 2020

• CSE 291: Advanced Data Analytics and ML Systems: Winter 2019, Winter 2018, Winter 2017

• CSE 290: Seminar on Integrative AI Engineering: Fall 2018

• CSE 290: Seminar on Advanced Data Science: Fall 2017, Spring 2017

• CS 564: Database Management Systems: Design and Implementation (Fall 2015 at UW-Madison)

Current:

• Tara Mirmira (PhD, CSE, USCD)

• Supun Nakandala (PhD, CSE, UCSD)

• Vraj Shah (PhD, CSE, UCSD)

• Yutong Shao (PhD, CSE, UCSD); Primary advisor: Ndapa Nakashole

• Yuhao Zhang (PhD, CSE, UCSD)

• Xiuwen Zheng (PhD, CSE, USCD); Co-advisor: Amarnath Gupta

• Side Li (MS, CSE, UCSD)

• Advitya Gemawat (BS, HDSI, UCSD)

• Kabir Nagrecha (BS, CSE, UCSD)

• Shaoqing Yi (BS, HDSI and Math, UCSD)

Alumni:

• Kevin Yang (BS, CSE, UCSD, 2020); First employment: MS at UPenn

• David Justo (MS, CSE UCSD, 2019); Co-advisor: Nadia Polikarpova; First employment: Microsoft

• Side Li (BS, CSE, UCSD, 2018); First employment: Amazon

• Anthony Thomas (MS, CSE, UCSD, 2018); First employment: PhD at UCSD

• Lingjiao Chen (MS, CS, UW-Madison, 2018); First employment: PhD at Stanford

• Mingyang Wang (MS, CSE, UCSD, 2017); First employment: Amazon

Organization:

• Associate Editor, Scalable Data Science Category, VLDB 2022, 2021 (Inaugural)

• Co-Chair, Diversity and Inclusion, ACM SIGMOD 2022, 2021 (Inaugural)

• Core Committee member, Diversity & Inclusion in DB Initiative, 2021 (Inaugural)

• (Inaugural) Lead Organizer, SoCal DB Day 2018

• Co-Chair, ACM SIGMOD Workshop on Data Management for End-to-End Machine Learning (DEEM) 2018

• (Inaugural) Organizing Committee, ACM SIGKDD Workshop on Common Model Infrastructure (CMI) 2018

• Organizing Committee, Extremely Large Databases (XLDB) 2018

Program Committee:

• VLDB: 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018

• ACM SIGMOD: 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017

• CIDR: 2021

• ACM SIGMOD DEEM Workshop: 2021, 2020, 2019, 2017

• MLSys / SysML: 2020, 2019

• ACM SIGMOD 2017 Demonstrations; Student Research Competition

• IEEE ICDE 2017

• USENIX HotCloud 2016

• ACM SIGMOD 2016 Undergraduate Research Poster Competition

Reviewer:

• ACM Transactions on Database Systems (TODS) 2017, 2015

• IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering (TKDE) 2014

Blog Posts and Talks:

• 2021 Apr. Award acceptance talk at ICDE 2021 for my TCDE Rising Star Award: Video and Slides PDF.

• 2021 Apr. Short talk on free speech and inclusivity at UCSD CSE faculty meeting inclusion minutes (PDF of slides).

• 2020 Feb. ACM SIGMOD Blog post on the new PVLDB research track category Scalable Data Science.

• 2020 Feb. Blog post on inclusive CS examples to raise awareness of the importance of inclusion and avoiding exclusionary examples in CS.

• 2019 Jul. Talk on data science careers to high school students at SDSC's REHS summer workshop and QI's Big Data summer camp at UCSD.

• 2019 Jun. Article on ACM SIGARCH Blog about a SIGMOD 2019 research paper of mine.

• 2018 Aug. ACM SIGMOD Blog post on the panel discussion at ACM SIGMOD DEEM Workshop 2019 to raise awareness of the evolving role of the database research community in the ML systems/applications arena.

• 2018 Apr. Blog post on the culture wars of the database/data management community c. early 2018) o raise awareness of the inherent intellectual multiculturalism of the research area.

• 2017 Oct. Blog post on my coming out experience from my sociocultural and individual vantage point.

Interviews and Panels:

• 2021 Feb. Interview by UCSD oSTEM Chapter on my research and thoughts on the LGBTQ+ community in CS.

• 2020 Nov. Panel discussion on Impostor Syndrome organized by UCSD oSTEM Chapter.

• 2020 Nov. Panel discussion on AI ethics organized by UCSD Office of Innovation and Commercialization.

• 2020 Feb. Interviews by UCSD's Data Science Student Society on scalable analytics and career options and on ethical risks/benefits of AI and other emerging technologies.

• 2019 Apr. Interviewed by Software Engineering Daily at Strata Data Conference 2019 for an article on systems for ML.

• 2018 Feb. Interview by SIGMOD 2018 WebDB Workshop for an ACM SIGMOD Blog article on the intersection of ML and data systems.

News and Other Resources:

• 2021 Apr. Heartbreak of a CS Fool; an essay/poem on the CS field.

• 2021 Feb. Newsletter article by UCSD CNS on my group's research on scalable and optimized systems for deep learning.

• 2021 Feb. Website of the D & I in DB initiative for unifying Diversity & Inclusion efforts across database conference venues.

• 2020 Apr. Article for SIGMOD 2021 on inclusion and diversity in research writing.