Shivnath Babu D338 Levine Science Research Center Department of Computer Science  Duke University  Durham, NC 27708  myfirstname@cs.duke.edu Phone: 919-660-6579 Fax: 919-660-6519

I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Duke University. My research group is developing new data management techniques to tackle the problem of increasing complexity and administrative cost in computing systems. We would like to make all computing systems, ranging from desktops to the gigantic cloud computing platforms, easy to use, maintain, and control. Our work is supported by startup funds from Duke, grants from the US National Science Foundation, faculty awards from IBM, and an equipment grant from IBM.

I am co-chairing the Workshop on Self-Managing Database Systems (SMDB 2010) to be held in conjunction with ICDE 2010.

Research Interests

• Database systems
  • Architectures and algorithms for self-managing database systems
  • Data management for new application domains, e.g., elastic cloud computing
• Autonomic computing

Projects

• .eX: A Platform for Experiment-Driven System Management (current)
• Ques: Querying and controlling systems (current). DIADS is a subproject of Ques.
• STREAM: Stanford Stream Data Manager (completed)

Teaching

• CPS 216: Advanced Database Systems, Fall 2009
• CPS 196.03: Information Management and Mining, Spring 2009
• CPS 216: Advanced Database Systems, Fall 2006, 2007, 2008
• CPS 49S: Google: The Computer Science Within and its Impact on Society, Spring 2007 and 2008. This class got some press, e.g., the Duke News article and the Duke Magazine article.
• CPS 296.2: Self-Managing Systems, Spring 2006

Awards

• IBM Faculty Award, 2008
• NSF CAREER, 2007-2011
• IBM Faculty Award, 2007
• IBM Faculty Award, 2006

Recent Publications

• S. Duan, V. Thummala, and S. Babu. Tuning Database Configuration Parameters with iTuned
  In Proc. of the International Conference on Very Large Databases (VLDB), August 2009


• H. Herodotou and S. Babu. Automated SQL Tuning through Trial and (Sometimes) Error
  In Proc. of the Second Workshop on Testing Database Systems (DBTest), June 2009


• M. Ahmad, A. Aboulnaga, and S. Babu. Query Interactions in Database Workloads
  In Proc. of the Second Workshop on Testing Database Systems (DBTest), June 2009


• A. Demberel, J. Chase, and S. Babu. Reflective Control for an Elastic Cloud Application: An Automated Experiment Workbench
  In Proc. of the First Workshop on Hot Topics in Cloud Computing (HotCloud), in conjunction with USENIX Annual Technical Conference, June 2009


• H. Lim, S. Babu, J. Chase, and S. Parekh. Automated Control in Cloud Computing: Challenges and Opportunities
  In Proc. of the First Workshop on Automated Control for Datacenters and Clouds, June 2009


• S. Babu, N. Borisov, S. Duan, H. Herodotou, and V. Thummala. Automated Experiment-Driven Management of (Database) Systems
  In Proc. of the 12th Workshop on Hot Topics in Operating Systems (HotOS), May 2009


• S. Duan, S. Babu, and K. Munagala. Fa: A System for Automating Failure Diagnosis
  In Proc. of 2009 IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE), April 2009


• S. Babu, N. Borisov, S. Uttamchandani, R. Routray, and A. Singh. DIADS: Addressing the "My-Problem-or-Yours" Syndrome with Integrated SAN and Database Diagnosis
  In Proc. of the USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies (FAST), February 2009


• N. Borisov, S.Babu, S. Uttamchandani, R. Routray, and A. Singh. Why Did My Query Slow Down?
  Technical report at arXiv.org. This paper was presented in the Proceedings track of the 2009 Conference on Innovative Data Systems Research (CIDR), January 2009
  Note: Because of CIDR's "one-submission-per-author" rule, I am not listed officially in the CIDR proceedings as an author


• S. Duan and S. Babu. Empirical Comparison of Techniques for Automated Failure Diagnosis
  In Proc. of the Third Workshop on Tackling Computer Systems Problems with Machine Learning Techniques (SysML), December 2008


• M. Ahmad, A. Aboulnaga, S. Babu, and K. Munagala. Modeling and Exploiting Query Interactions in Database Systems
  In Proc. of ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM), October 2008


• R. Thonangi, V. Thummala, and S. Babu. Finding Good Configurations in High-Dimensional Spaces: Doing More with Less
  In Proc. of the IEEE International Symposium on Modeling, Analysis, and Simulation of Computer and Telecommunication Systems (MASCOTS), September 2008


• S. Babu. Grand Challenge: Experiment-driven Adaptive Systems
  Vision paper written for invitation to the third Workshop on Hot Topics in Autonomic Computing (HotAC III), June 2008


• P. Shivam, V. Marupadi, J. Chase, and S. Babu. Cutting Corners: Workbench Automation for Server Benchmarking
  In Proc. of the 2008 USENIX Annual Technical Conference, June 2008


• S. Duan and S. Babu. Guided Problem Diagnosis through Active Learning
  In Proc. of the International Conference on Autonomic Computing (ICAC), June 2008


• S. Babu, S. Duan, and K. Munagala. Processing Diagnosis Queries: A Principled and Scalable Approach
  Poster at the International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE), April 2008.


• M. Ahmad, A. Aboulnaga, S. Babu, and K. Munagala. QShuffler: Getting the Query Mix Right
  Poster at the International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE), April 2008.


• S. Duan and S. Babu. Processing Forecasting Queries
  In Proc. of the International Conference on Very Large Databases (VLDB), September 2007


• B. Chandramouli, C. Bond, S. Babu, and J. Yang. Query Suspend and Resume
  In Proc. of the 2007 ACM Intl. Conf. on Management of Data (SIGMOD), June 2007


• A. Yumerefendi, P. Shivam, D. Irwin, P. Gunda, L. Grit, A. Demberel, J. Chase, and S. Babu. Towards an Autonomic Computing Testbed
  In Workshop on Hot Topics in Autonomic Computing (HotAC), June 2007


• B. Cook, S. Babu, G. Candea, and S. Duan. Towards Self-Healing Multitier Services
  In Second Intl. Workshop on Self-Managing Database Systems (SMDB), April 2007


• B. Chandramouli, C. Bond, S. Babu, and J. Yang. On Suspending and Resuming Dataflows (poster).
  In Proc. of IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE), April 2007


• P. Shivam, S. Babu, and J. Chase. Active and Accelerated Learning of Cost Models for Optimizing Scientific Applications
  In Proc. of the International Conference on Very Large Databases (VLDB), September 2006


• P. Shivam, S. Babu, and J. Chase. Active Sampling for Accelerated Learning of Performance Models
  In Proc. of the First Workshop on Tackling Computer Systems Problems with Machine Learning Techniques (SysML), June 2006


• P. Shivam, S. Babu, and J. Chase. Learning Application Models for Utility Resource Planning
  In Proc. of IEEE International Conference on Autonomic Computing (ICAC), June 2006


• A. Arasu, S. Babu, and J. Widom. The CQL Continuous Query Language: Semantic Foundations and Query Execution
  In the International Journal on Very Large Databases (VLDB Journal), 15:2 121-142, June 2006

Demonstrations

• N. Borisov, S. Babu, S. Uttamchandani, R. Routray, and A. Singh. DIADS: A Problem Diagnosis Tool for Databases and Storage Area Networks
  Demonstrated at the 2009 International Conference on Very Large Databases (VLDB), August 2009


• S. Duan, P. Franklin, V. Thummala, D. Zhao, and S. Babu. Shaman: A Self-Healing Database System
  Demonstrated at the 2009 IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE), April 2009


• S. Duan and S. Babu. Automated Diagnosis of System Failures with Fa
  Demonstrated at the 2009 IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE), April 2009


• P. Shivam, A. Demberel, P. Gunda, D. Irwin, L. Grit, A. Yumerefendi, S. Babu, and J. Chase.
  Automated and On-Demand Provisioning of Virtual Machines for Database Applications
  Demonstrated at the 2007 ACM Intl. Conf. on Management of Data (SIGMOD 2007), June 2007


• S. Duan and S. Babu. Proactive Identification of Performance Problems
  Demonstrated at the 2006 ACM Intl. Conf. on Management of Data (SIGMOD 2006), June 2006


• S. Babu, P. Bizarro, and D. DeWitt. Proactive Re-optimization with Rio
  Demonstrated at the 2005 ACM Intl. Conf. on Management of Data (SIGMOD 2005), June 2005


• S. Babu and J. Widom. StreaMon: An Adaptive Engine for Stream Query Processing
  Demonstrated at the 2004 ACM Intl. Conf. on Management of Data (SIGMOD 2004), June 2004


• A. Arasu, B. Babcock, S. Babu, M. Datar, K. Ito, I. Nishizawa, J. Rosenstein, and J. Widom. STREAM: The Stanford Stream Data Manager
  Demonstrated at the 2003 ACM Intl. Conf. on Management of Data (SIGMOD 2003), June 2003

Software Releases

• STREAM Data Stream Management System
  • Source code is available here
  • Online system demonstration is available here