Papers by Christopher Olston

• Research community reports
• Machine learning
• Enterprise data management
• Continuous data processing workflows
• Data pipeline programming & debugging
• Large-scale data processing
• Web monitoring & crawling
• Web search
• Web application scalability
• Distributed data monitoring
• Data visualization

Research community reports

Numerous co-authors. The Beckman Report on Database Research. ACM SIGMOD Record, September 2014. (Condensed version in Communications of the ACM, February 2016.)

Numerous co-authors. Frontiers in Massive Data Analysis. Report of the National Research Council, 2013.

Machine learning

A. Beutel, A. Ly, C. Olston, D. Altinbuken, E. H. Chi, H. Abu-Libdeh, L. P. Doshi, T. K. Kraska, X. Li. Learned Indexes for a Google-scale Disk-based Database. Short paper. NeurIPS Workshop on ML for Systems, December 2020.

C. Olston, N. Fiedel, K. Gorovoy, J. Harmsen, L. Lao, F. Li, V. Rajashekhar, S. Ramesh, J. Soyke. TensorFlow-Serving: Flexible, High-Performance ML Serving. Short paper. NIPS Workshop on ML Systems, December 2017.

Enterprise data management

A. Halevy, F. Korn, N. Noy, C. Olston, N. Polyzotis, S. Roy and S. E. Whang. Managing Google’s Data Lake: An Overview of the Goods System. In Data Engineering Bulletin, Vol. 39, No. 3, Sept 2016.

A. Halevy, F. Korn, N. Noy, C. Olston, N. Polyzotis, S. Roy and S. E. Whang. Goods: Organizing Google’s Datasets. ACM SIGMOD 2016 International Conference on Management of Data (Industrial Track), San Francisco, California, June 2016.

Continuous data processing workflows

C. Olston et al. Nova: Continuous Pig/Hadoop Workflows. ACM SIGMOD 2011 International Conference on Management of Data (Industrial Track), Athens, Greece, June 2011.

C. Olston. Graceful Logic Evolution in Web Data Processing Workflows. Technical report, February 2011.

C. Olston. Modeling and Scheduling Asynchronous Incremental Workflows. Technical report, February 2011.

D. Logothetis, C. Olston, B. Reed, K. C. Webb and K. Yocum. Stateful Bulk Processing for Incremental Algorithms. ACM Symposium on Cloud Computing (SOCC), Indianapolis, Indiana, June 2010.

Data pipeline programming & debugging

B. Chin, D. von Dincklage, V. Ercegovak, P. Hawkins, M. S. Miller, F. Och, C. Olston and F. Pereira. Yedalog: Exploring Knowledge at Scale. In Proceedings of the Summit on Advances in Programming Languages (SNAPL), Asilomar, California, May 2015.

C. Olston and B. Reed. Inspector Gadget: A Framework for Custom Monitoring and Debugging of Distributed Dataflows. Thirty-Seventh International Conference on Very Large Data Bases (VLDB) (Industrial, Applications and Experience Track), Seattle, Washington, August 2011.

C. Olston and A. Das Sarma. Ibis: A Provenance Manager for Multi-Layer Systems. Fifth Biennial Conference on Innovative Data Systems Research (CIDR), Asilomar, California, January 2011.

C. Olston, S. Chopra and U. Srivastava. Generating Example Data for Dataflow Programs. Best paper award. ACM SIGMOD 2009 International Conference on Management of Data, Providence, Rhode Island, June 2009.

C. Olston, B. Reed, U. Srivastava, R. Kumar and A. Tomkins. Pig Latin: A Not-So-Foreign Language for Data Processing. ACM SIGMOD 2008 International Conference on Management of Data (Industrial Track), Vancouver, Canada, June 2008.

Large-scale data processing

X. Wang, A. Das Sarma, C. Olston and R. Burns. CoScan: Cooperative Scan Sharing in the Cloud. Second ACM Symposium on Cloud Computing (SOCC), Cascais, Portugal, October 2011.

K. Morton, M. Balazinska, D. Grossman and C. Olston. The Case for Being Lazy: How to Leverage Lazy Evaluation in MapReduce. Short paper. 2nd Workshop on Scientific Cloud Computing, San Jose, California, June 2011.

A. F. Gates, O. Natkovich, S. Chopra, P. Kamath, S. M. Narayanamurthy, C. Olston, B. Reed, S. Srinivasan and U. Srivastava. Building a High-Level Dataflow System on top of Map-Reduce: The Pig Experience. Invited paper. Thirty-Fifth International Conference on Very Large Data Bases (VLDB) (Industrial, Applications and Experience Track), Lyon, France, August 2009.

C. Olston, E. Bortnikov, K. Elmeleegy, F. Junqueira and B. Reed. Interactive Analysis of Web-Scale Data. Short paper. Fourth Biennial Conference on Innovative Data Systems Research (CIDR) (Perspectives Track), Asilomar, California, January 2009.

P. Agrawal, D. Kifer and C. Olston. Scheduling Shared Scans of Large Data Files. Thirty-Fourth International Conference on Very Large Data Bases (VLDB), Auckland, New Zealand, August 2008.

C. Olston, B. Reed, A. Silberstein and U. Srivastava. Automatic Optimization of Parallel Dataflow Programs. Short paper. 2008 USENIX Annual Technical Conference, Boston, Massachusetts, June 2008.

L. Chen, C. Olston and R. Ramakrishnan. Parallel Evaluation of Composite Aggregate Queries. Twenty-Fourth International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE), Cancun, Mexico, April 2008.

Web monitoring & crawling

C. Olston and M. Najork. Web Crawling. Invited survey article. Journal of Foundations and Trends in Information Retrieval, 4(3):175-246, 2010. [pdf]

C. Olston and S. Pandey. Recrawl Scheduling Based on Information Longevity. Seventeenth International World Wide Web Conference, Beijing, China, April 2008.

S. Pandey and C. Olston. Crawl Ordering by Search Impact. First ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining (WSDM), Palo Alto, California, February 2008.

A. Dasgupta, A. Ghosh, R. Kumar, C. Olston, S. Pandey and A. Tomkins. The Discoverability of the Web. Sixteenth International World Wide Web Conference, Banff, Canada, May 2007.

S. Pandey and C. Olston. User-Centric Web Crawling. Fourteenth International World Wide Web Conference, Chiba, Japan, May 2005.

S. Pandey, K. Dhamdhere and C. Olston. WIC: A General-Purpose Algorithm for Monitoring Web Information Sources. Thirtieth International Conference on Very Large Data Bases (VLDB), Toronto, Canada, August 2004.

A. Ntoulas, J. Cho and C. Olston. What's New on the Web? The Evolution of the Web from a Search Engine Perspective. Thirteenth International World Wide Web Conference, New York, New York, May 2004.

Web search

M. Welch, J. Cho and C. Olston. Search Diversity for Informational Queries. Twentieth International World Wide Web Conference, Hyderabad, India, March 2011.

M. Fontoura, V. Josifovski, R. Kumar, C. Olston, A. Tomkins and S. Vassilvitskii. Relaxation in Text Search using Taxonomies. Thirty-Fourth International Conference on Very Large Data Bases (VLDB), Auckland, New Zealand, August 2008.

S. Pandit and C. Olston. Navigation-Aided Retrieval. Sixteenth International World Wide Web Conference, Banff, Canada, May 2007.

S. Pandey and C. Olston. Handling Advertisements of Unknown Quality in Search Advertising. Twentieth Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS), Vancouver, Canada, December 2006.

S. Pandey, S. Roy, C. Olston, J. Cho and S. Chakrabarti. Shuffling a Stacked Deck: The Case for Partially Randomized Ranking of Search Engine Results. Thirty-First International Conference on Very Large Data Bases (VLDB), Trondheim, Norway, August 2005.

C. Olston and E. H. Chi. ScentTrails: Integrating Browsing and Searching on the World Wide Web. ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction, September 2003, 10(3):177-197. (Extended abstract featured in ACM Interactions Magazine, Sept/Oct 2003.)

Web application scalability

C. Garrod, A. Manjhi, A. Ailamaki, B. Maggs, T. Mowry, C. Olston and A. Tomasic. Scalable Query Result Caching for Web Applications. Thirty-Fourth International Conference on Very Large Data Bases (VLDB), Auckland, New Zealand, August 2008.

A. Manjhi, P. Gibbons, A. Ailamaki, C. Garrod, B. Maggs, T. Mowry, C. Olston, A. Tomasic and H. Yu. Invalidation Clues for Database Scalability Services. Twenty-Third International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE), Istanbul, Turkey, April 2007.

A. Manjhi, A. Ailamaki, B. Maggs, T. Mowry, C. Olston and A. Tomasic. Simultaneous Scalability and Security for Data-Intensive Web Applications. ACM SIGMOD 2006 International Conference on Management of Data, Chicago, Illinois, June 2006.

C. Olston, A. Manjhi, C. Garrod, A. Ailamaki, B. Maggs and T. Mowry. A Scalability Service for Dynamic Web Applications. Second Biennial Conference on Innovative Data Systems Research (CIDR), Asilomar, California, January 2005.

Distributed data monitoring

A. Manjhi, V. Shkapenyuk, K. Dhamdhere and C. Olston. Finding (Recently) Frequent Items in Distributed Data Streams. Twenty-First International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE), Tokyo, Japan, April 2005.

C. Olston and J. Widom. Efficient Monitoring and Querying of Distributed, Dynamic Data via Approximate Replication. Invited article. IEEE Data Engineering Bulletin, Special Issue on In-Network Query Processing, March 2005.

C. Olston. Approximate Replication. Doctoral dissertation, Stanford University, June 2003.

C. Olston, J. Jiang and J. Widom. Adaptive Filters for Continuous Queries over Distributed Data Streams. ACM SIGMOD 2003 International Conference on Management of Data, San Diego, California, June 2003.

B. Babcock and C. Olston. Distributed Top-K Monitoring. ACM SIGMOD 2003 International Conference on Management of Data, San Diego, California, June 2003.

T. Feder, R. Motwani, L. O'Callaghan, C. Olston and R. Panigrahy. Computing Shortest Paths with Uncertainty. Twentieth International Symposium on Theoretical Aspects of Computer Science (STACS), February 2003. Extended version appears in: Journal of Algorithms 62(1):1-18 (2007).

R. Motwani, J. Widom, A. Arasu, B. Babcock, S. Babu, M. Datar, G. Manku, C. Olston, J. Rosenstein and R. Varma. Query Processing, Resource Management, and Approximation in a Data Stream Management System. First Biennial Conference on Innovative Data Systems Research (CIDR), Asilomar, California, January 2003.

C. Olston and J. Widom. Best-Effort Cache Synchronization with Source Cooperation. ACM SIGMOD 2002 International Conference on Management of Data, Madison, Wisconsin, June 2002.

C. Olston, B. T. Loo and J. Widom. Adaptive Precision Setting for Cached Approximate Values. ACM SIGMOD 2001 International Conference on Management of Data, Santa Barbara, California, May 2001.

C. Olston and J. Widom. Offering a Precision-Performance Tradeoff for Aggregation Queries over Replicated Data. Twenty-Sixth International Conference on Very Large Data Bases (VLDB), Cairo, Egypt, September 2000.

T. Feder, R. Motwani, R. Panigrahy, C. Olston and J. Widom. Computing the Median with Uncertainty. Thirty-Second ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing (STOC), Portland, Oregon, May 2000. Extended version appears in: SIAM Journal on Computing 32(2):538-547 (2003).

Data visualization

C. Olston and J. Mackinlay. Visualizing Data with Bounded Uncertainty. Short paper. IEEE Symposium on Information Visualization, Boston, Massachusetts, October 2002.

C. Olston. A Spatial Model for Nested Multiscale Interfaces. Stanford University Technical Report, October 2002.

A. Woodruff, C. Olston, A. Aiken, M. Chu, V. Ercegovac, M. Lin, M. Spalding and M. Stonebraker. DataSplash: A Direct Manipulation Environment for Programming Semantic Zoom Visualizations of Tabular Data. Journal of Visual Languages and Computing, Special Issue on Visual Languages for End-user and Domain-specific Programming, 12(5), October 2001.

C. Olston and A. Woodruff. Getting Portals to Behave. IEEE Symposium on Information Visualization, Salt Lake City, Utah, October 2000.

J. M. Hellerstein, R. Avnur, A. Chou, C. Hidber, C. Olston, V. Raman, T. Roth and P. Haas. Interactive Data Analysis: The Control Project. IEEE Computer 32(8), August 1999.

C. Olston, M. Stonebraker, A. Aiken and J. M. Hellerstein. VIQING: Visual Interactive QueryING. Fourteenth IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages, Halifax, Canada, September 1998.

A. Woodruff and C. Olston. Iconification and Omission in Information Exploration. Short paper. SIGCHI 1998 Workshop on Innovation and Evaluation in Information Exploration Interfaces, Los Angeles, CA, April 1998.

The documents distributed by this server have been provided by the contributing authors as a means to ensure timely dissemination of scholarly and technical work on a noncommercial basis. Copyright and all rights therein are maintained by the authors or by other copyright holders, notwithstanding that they have offered their works here electronically. It is understood that all persons copying this information will adhere to the terms and constraints invoked by each author's copyright. These works may not be reposted without the explicit permission of the copyright holder.

Other restrictions to copying individual documents may apply.

Back to Christopher Olston's home page