David Schonenberg

Blog Posts

Forbes: “Berkeley Research Lab Group Mints Second Billion-Dollar Business In Startup Anyscale”

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Anyscale cofounders Robert Nishihara, Ion Stoica, and Philipp Moritz Anyscale is making news with their latest round of funding, featured in articles this week in Forbes: “Berkeley Research Lab Group Mints Second Billion-Dollar Business In Startup Anyscale” and TechCrunch: “Anyscale adds $40M to bring its Ray-based distributed computing tech to the enterprise masses.” Founded by RISELab co-director Ion Stoica and RISELab Ph.D. graduates Robert Nishihara and Philipp Moritz, Anyscale uses the Ray tools developed in RISELab to allow individual users to take full advantage of distributed computing to scale AI applications in the cloud.

“RAMP-TAO: Layering Atomic Transactions on Facebook’s Online TAO Data Store” Wins Best Industry Paper Award at VLDB 2021

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Congratulations to RISELab’s Audrey Cheng, Natacha Crooks, Ion Stoica, Peter Bailis and their Facebook collaborators! “RAMP-TAO: Layering Atomic Transactions on Facebook’s Online TAO Data Store“, won Best Industry Paper Award at VLDB 2021. More about VLDB: VLDB 2021 – 47th International Conference on Very Large Data Bases The VLDB 2021 conference, will take place in Copenhagen, Denmark, 16-20 August 2021, and will feature research talks, tutorials, demonstrations, and workshops. It will cover issues in data management, database and information systems research. VLDB is a premier annual international forum for data management and database researchers, vendors, practitioners, application developers, and users. VLDB 2021 – Conference Awards Best Paper, Best Demo, and Distinguished Reviewers.

RISE postdoc Hao Zhang wins Jay Lepreau Best Paper Award at OSDI ’21 for: “Pollux: Co-adaptive Cluster Scheduling for Goodput-Optimized Deep Learning”

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Congrats Hao! RISE lab postdoc Hao Zhang–working with Prof. Ion Stoica–has won the Jay Lepreau Best Paper Award at OSDI ’21 for the paper: “Pollux: Co-adaptive Cluster Scheduling for Goodput-Optimized Deep Learning”. This paper develops a new measure of goodness for designing and implementing resource scheduling systems for deep learning, namely Goodput, which combines statistical efficiency and system throughput for deep learning. It demonstrates a new system for optimizing Elastic Deep Learning in GPU Clusters. The system will be integrated with Ray ecosystem soon. More details about the paper and code can be found here: Presentation: https://www.usenix.org/conference/osdi21/presentation/qiao Paper: https://www.usenix.org/system/files/osdi21-qiao.pdf Code: https://github.com/petuum/adaptdl Integration with Ray: https://github.com/ray-project/ray/issues/17054

Sam Kumar wins OSDI Jay Lepreau Best Paper Award

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Congratulations Sam! Originally posted on EECS NEWS: Submitted by Magdalene L. Crowley on July 19, 2021 – 11:52am Sam Kumar wins OSDI Jay Lepreau Best Paper Award CS graduate student Sam Kumar (advisors: David Culler and Raluca Ada Popa) has won the Jay Lepreau Best Paper Award at the 15th USENIX Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI) for “MAGE: Nearly Zero-Cost Virtual Memory for Secure Computation.”   The OSDI, which brings together “professionals from academic and industrial backgrounds in a premier forum for discussing the design, implementation, and implications of systems software,” selects three best papers each year after a double-blind review.  Co-authored by Prof. David Culler and Associate Prof. Raluca Ada Popa, the paper introduces an execution engine for secure computation…

The inside story of how UC Berkeley became the incubator for red-hot enterprise startups Databricks, SiFive, and Anyscale

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Business Insider reports on how RISELab’s unique research model has sparked a generation of successful startups, featuring interviews with RISELab directors Raluca Ada Popa, Ion Stoica, and other RISE, AMP and RADLab alumni. “It is the combination of the talent in the labs, and the format, and the track record of the labs that keeps on continuing,” said Raluca Ada Popa. Read more on Business Insider. (Or here without ads)

Ray Summit 2021

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Ray Summit was a huge success this year, with seventy one individual speakers presenting over three days to an audience of more than twelve thousand attendees. Visit the Ray Summit website to view the talks.

MAGE Wins Best Paper Award at OSDI

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The paper “MAGE: Nearly Zero-Cost Virtual Memory for Secure Computation” was among three selected at this Best Paper award at OSDI ’21. Congratulations to Sam Kumar, Dave Culler and Raluca Ada Popa for their win. Read the paper here. Abstract:  Secure Computation (SC) is a family of cryptographic primitives for computing on encrypted data in single-party and multi-party settings. SC is being increasingly adopted by industry for a variety of applications. A significant obstacle to using SC for practical applications is the memory overhead of the underlying cryptography. We develop MAGE, an execution engine for SC that efficiently runs SC computations that do not fit in memory. We observe that, due to their intended security guarantees, SC schemes are inherently oblivious—their…

Alvin Cheung awarded the 2020 Intel Outstanding Researcher Award

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Congratulations Alvin! Originally posted on EECS News and Intel.com: EECS Assistant Profs. Alvin Cheung and Jonathan Ragan-Kelley are among 18 winners of Intel’s 2020 Outstanding Research Awards (ORA). These awards recognize exceptional contributions made through Intel university-sponsored research.  Cheung and Ragan-Kelley are developing ARION, a system for compiling programs onto heterogeneous platforms. The team will use verified lifting, which rewrites legacy code into a clean specification, stripping away optimizations that target legacy architectures. This spec, written in a DSL, can then be compiled to new platforms, sometimes with orders of magnitude of speedup in resulting code performance. Intel’s 2020 Outstanding Researcher Awards Recognize 18 Academic Researchers

David Patterson wins Frontiers of Knowledge Award

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Congratulations Dave! Reposted from EECS News: CS Prof. Emeritus David Patterson has won the 13th BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Information and Communication Technologies.  He shares the award with John Hennessy of Stanford University “for taking computer architecture, the discipline behind the central processor or ‘brain’ of every computer system, and launching it as a new scientific area.”  The citation says that Patterson and Hennessy “are synonymous with the inception and formalization of this field.  Before their work, the design of computers – and in particular the measurement of computer performance – was more of an art than a science, and practitioners lacked a set of repeatable principles to conceptualize and evaluate computer designs. Patterson and Hennessy provided, for…

RSVP for the RISELab Poster Session / BEARS Symposium – Thursday February 11, 2021

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We are pleased to announce that RISELab will hold a virtual poster session as part of the BEARS 2021 Research Symposium on February 11, 2021 from 1:00-2:30pm PST. This virtual event will highlight the exciting projects that RISELab’s researchers have been working on in recent months. You will have the opportunity to view posters and interact virtually with the graduate and undergraduate poster presenters, RISELab faculty, and other event guests. Remember, you must RSVP separately for both events: Register for BEARS here. (Select UCB Student, Employee or Industrial Affiliate for complimentary registration.) RSVP for the RISELab poster session here. A RISELab Poster Session event link will be emailed to everyone on our RSVP list on the day of the event. Please RSVP by February 10. Questions? Email us…

Read + Watch: “New Directions in Cloud Programming” from CIDR 2021

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RISELab researchers Alvin Cheung, Natacha Crooks, Joseph M. Hellerstein, Matthew Milano presented “New Directions in Cloud Programming” at CIDR 2021. Read the paper here. Watch the talk on youtube. ABSTRACT Nearly twenty years after the launch of AWS, it remains difficult for most developers to harness the enormous potential of the cloud. In this paper we lay out an agenda for a new generation of cloud programming research aimed at bringing research ideas to programmers in an evolutionary fashion. Key to our approach is a separation of distributed programs into a PACT of four facets: Program semantics, Availablity, Consistency and Targets of optimization. We propose to migrate developers gradually to PACT programming by lifting familiar code into our more declarative level of…

Natacha Crooks wins 2020 ACM SIGOPS Dennis M. Ritchie dissertation award

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Originally posted on UC Berkeley EECS News   Natacha Crooks wins 2020 ACM SIGOPS Dennis M. Ritchie dissertation award CS Assistant Prof. Natacha Crooks has won the 2020 ACM Special Interest Group on Operating Systems (SIGOPS) Dennis M. Ritchie dissertation award for her thesis titled “A Client-Centric Approach to Transactional Datastores.”  The award, which recognizes creative research in software systems, was bestowed upon a dissertation which a colleague described as “a landmark, with deep and beautiful results in transactions and distributed consistency, and systems that exploit them.”  The award committee commented that “Natacha Crooks’ thesis achieves something rare: a new conceptual framework for client-centric consistency and two efficient systems built on those insights. The document for this attractive package is…

RISELab Best Paper Awards

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RISELab researchers were recognized with best paper awards at recent SIGMOD, VLDB and ICDE conferences. 2019 ACM SIGMOD Research Highlight Award “Interactive Checks for Coordination Avoidance”, VLDB 2019 — Michael J. Whittaker and Joseph M. Hellerstein VLDB 2019 selected best papers “Interactive Checks for Coordination Avoidance” — Michael J. Whittaker and Joseph M. Hellerstein “Autoscaling Tiered Cloud Storage in Anna.” — Chenggang Wu, Vikram Sreekanti, Joseph M. Hellerstein ICDE 2018 selected best papers “Anna: A KVS For Any Scale.” — Chenggang Wu, Jose M. Faleiro, Yihan Lin, Joseph M. Hellerstein. Congratulations to RISELab’s Jose Faleiro, Joe Hellerstein, Vikram Srikanti, Michael Whittaker, and Chenggang Wu in recognition of their groundbreaking research!

Please join the first Ray Summit Connect

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Hello, Anyscale will be hosting a complimentary new online speaker series, Ray Summit Connect, throughout the Summer. Join these events to learn more about the future of Ray. The first hour-long event in the series kicks off May 13th. During this event, Prof. Michael Jordan and I will provide our perspectives on the state and future of AI and computing. Please check out anyscale.com/events to register and see other future events coming over the coming months. If you are interested, please register above. Also, please feel free to forward this email to your colleagues. We look forward to having you join this event! Best, Ion

RISELab Open House and Poster Session 2/13/20

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This year’s BEARS Symposium will be held on Thursday 2/13/20 at the International House in Berkeley from 9am-5pm. https://eecs.berkeley.edu/research/bears/2020 Concurrently, RISELab will host an Open House and Poster session from 1pm-3pm in the lab. Please join us for some engaging discussions over light snacks and refreshments. RISELab is located in 465 Soda Hall, on the corner of Hearst and LeRoy Avenues in Berkeley. See you there!

Two RISE Startups make list of “47 Enterprise Startups to Bet Your Career On in 2020”

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DataBricks and Anyscale made Business Insider’s list of “47 enterprise startups to bet your career on in 2020.” View the list on reddit if you don’t have a Business Insider account. Anyscale is the latest startup to come out of RISELab. A note from Anyscale co-founder and RISELab director Ion Stoica: Anyscale is the future of distributed computing. Founded by the creators of Ray, an open source project from the UC Berkeley RISELab, Anyscale enables developers of all skill levels to easily build applications that run at any scale, from a laptop to a data center. Anyscale empowers organizations to bring AI applications to production faster, reduce development costs, and eliminate the need for in-house expertise to deploy and manage…

Professor Michael Jordan wins 2020 IEEE John von Neumann Medal

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CS Prof. Michael I. Jordan has won the prestigious John von Neumann Medal from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). The award was established in 1990 to acknowledge “outstanding achievements in computer-related science and technology.” Jordan, who was ranked as the world’s most influential computer scientist in 2016 by Science magazine, was cited for “For contributions to machine learning and data science.” Jordan began developing recurrent neural networks as a cognitive model in the 1980s, was prominent in the formalisation of variational methods for approximate inference, and popularised both the expectation-maximization algorithm and Bayesian networks among the machine learning community. Jordan is the fifth Berkeley CS faculty member to win this award. Congratulations to Professor Jordan! https://eecs.berkeley.edu/news#news-3106

RISE Camp 2019 – Live stream on YouTube

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RISE Camp will be live streamed on YouTube later this week! Introductions begin at 8:45 AM on Thursday October 17, 2019. Use the following link to view. Find the agenda for both days here on the RISE Camp website. If you are interested in attending in-person, General Registration spots are available for a $600 registration fee. Please use the following link to register: https://www.eiseverywhere.com/ereg/index.php?eventid=478734&categoryid=3352675 Members of the UC Berkeley research community are encouraged to email risecamp@cs.berkeley.edu to inquire about complimentary spots. Best regards, The RISE Camp Team

The O’Reilly Data Show Podcast: Michael Mahoney on developing a practical theory for deep learning

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Prof. Michael Mahoney, one of RISELab’s faculty members, was interviewed on O’Reilly Data Show Podcast.   Topics included understanding deep neural networks and developing a practical theory for deep learning, the new Hessian AWare Quantization (HAWQ) framework for addressing problems pertaining to model size and inference speed/power, and how these relate to challenges at the foundations of data analysis.

Professor Popa: Decentralized Security CS 294-163

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Lectures: Tue/Thur 3:30pm – 4:59pm, 310 Soda Course description: Recently, there has been much excitement in both academia and industry around the notion of decentralized security, which refers to, loosely speaking, security mechanisms that do not rely on the trustworthyness of any central entity. In only a few years, this area has generated many beautiful cryptographic constructs as well as exciting systems with real-world adoption. The course will cover topics such as decentralized ledgers, blockchain/cryptocurrencies, decentralized access control, secure multi-party computation, federated learning, coopetitive learning, and others.   This is an advanced course, which will go deeply into both cryptography and systems. A solid foundation in cryptography is required, and a similar foundation in systems is beneficial. Logistics: The course is…

Professor Parameswaran receives VLDB Early Career Award

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Congratulations to RISELab’s newest faculty member Aditya Parameswaran  for winning this year’s VLDB Early Career Award. The award recognizes a researcher who has demonstrated research impact through a specific technical contribution of high significance since completing their Ph.D.   More information can be found here: https://vldb.org/2019/?2019-vldb-endowment-awards Congrats Aditya!    

New DARE Website Launched

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We are excited to announce the launch of RISELab’s DARE program. One of the most challenging barriers to participating in research for undergraduate students is reaching out to professors and finding a match that works for both the student and the professor.  DARE, founded by Professor Raluca Ada Popa and her students Wenting Zheng and Jessica Ji, acts as an active liaison to remove this barrier and make electrical engineering and computer science research more readily accessible, as well as to encourage diversity of thought in these growing fields. DARE strongly encourages women and traditionally under-represented groups to apply. Website: https://dare.berkeley.edu Raluca Ada Popa