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Arun Kumar

Assistant Professor
Computer Science and Engineering
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 at the University of California, San Diego. He is a member of the Database Lab and CNS 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 MADlib open-source library, shipped as part of products from EMC, Oracle, Cloudera, and IBM, and used internally by Facebook, LogicBlox, Microsoft, and other companies. He is a recipient of the ACM SIGMOD 2014 Best Paper Award, the 2016 Graduate Student Research Award for the best dissertation research in UW-Madison CS, a 2016 Google Faculty Research Award, and a 2018 Hellman Fellowship.

Curriculum Vitae | Research Blog | On Twitter

Recent News

  • New! Supun and Yuhao's short paper on Cerebro and Vraj's short paper on SortingHat are both accepted to the DEEM Workshop at SIGMOD 2019.

  • New! A big thank you to Oracle Labs for supporting our work on query optimization for ML systems with a research award!

  • Gave a talk at Strata Data Conference and interviewed by SE Daily on the topic of ML systems.

  • Vraj's demo on SpeakQL and Lingjiao's demo on Nimbus are both accepted to SIGMOD 2019.

  • Supun's paper on Krypton, query optimization for explaining CNN predictions, is accepted to SIGMOD 2019. Kudos to Supun on his first SIGMOD paper, a veritable tour de force! A demo proposal is also accepted to SysML 2019.

  • Morgan & Claypool publishes a book I co-authored with Matthias Boehm and Jun Yang, Data Management in ML Systems, the first book on the emerging area of ML systems (PDF on M&C webpage; order hard copy).

  • Side's paper on a non-linear variant of Morpheus gets a rare direct accept to SIGMOD 2019. Kudos to Side, the first undergraduate researcher I know to have accomplished this feat!


Research

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.


Teaching

Advising

Current:

  • Supun Nakandala (PhD, UCSD)

  • Vraj Shah (PhD, UCSD)

  • Yuhao Zhang (MS, UCSD)

  • Kevin Yang (BS, UCSD)

Alumni:

  • Lingjiao Chen (MS, UW-Madison, 2018)

  • Side Li (BS, UCSD, 2018)

  • Anthony Thomas (MS, UCSD, 2018)

  • Mingyang Wang (MS, UCSD, 2017)

Technical Service

Organization:

  • Lead Organizer, SoCal DB Day 2018

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

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

  • Organizing Committee, Extremely Large Databases (XLDB) 2018

Program Committee:

  • ACM SIGMOD 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017

  • VLDB 2020, 2019, 2018

  • SysML 2019

  • ACM SIGMOD DEEM Workshop 2019, 2017

  • 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