arXiv subjects

Lukasz Golab

Publications and source records attributed to Lukasz Golab.

31 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2021

Climate Action During COVID-19 Recovery and Beyond: A Twitter Text Mining Study

The Coronavirus pandemic created a global crisis that prompted immediate large-scale action, including economic shutdowns and mobility restrictions. These actions have had devastating effects on the economy, but some positive effects on the environment. As the world recovers from the pandemic, we ask the following question: What is the public attitude towards climate action during COVID-19 recovery and beyond? We answer this question by analyzing discussions on the Twitter social media platform. We find that most discussions support climate action and point out lessons learned during pandemic response that can shape future climate policy, although skeptics continue to have a presence. Additionally, concerns arise in the context of climate action during the pandemic, such as mitigating the risk of COVID-19 transmission on public transit.

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arXiv2021

Efficient Discovery of Approximate Order Dependencies

Order dependencies (ODs) capture relationships between ordered domains of attributes. Approximate ODs (AODs) capture such relationships even when there exist exceptions in the data. During automated discovery of ODs, validation is the process of verifying whether an OD holds. We present an algorithm for validating approximate ODs with significantly improved runtime performance over existing methods for AODs, and prove that it is correct and has optimal runtime. By replacing the validation step in a leading algorithm for approximate OD discovery with ours, we achieve orders-of-magnitude improvements in performance.

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arXiv2020

Iterative Edit-Based Unsupervised Sentence Simplification

We present a novel iterative, edit-based approach to unsupervised sentence simplification. Our model is guided by a scoring function involving fluency, simplicity, and meaning preservation. Then, we iteratively perform word and phrase-level edits on the complex sentence. Compared with previous approaches, our model does not require a parallel training set, but is more controllable and interpretable. Experiments on Newsela and WikiLarge datasets show that our approach is nearly as effective as state-of-the-art supervised approaches.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2020

XOX Fabric: A hybrid approach to blockchain transaction execution

Performance and scalability are major concerns for blockchains: permissionless systems are typically limited by slow proof of X consensus algorithms and sequential post-order transaction execution on every node of the network. By introducing a small amount of trust in their participants, permissioned blockchain systems such as Hyperledger Fabric can benefit from more efficient consensus algorithms and make use of parallel pre-order execution on a subset of network nodes. Fabric, in particular, has been shown to handle tens of thousands of transactions per second. However, this performance is only achievable for contention-free transaction workloads. If many transactions compete for a small set of hot keys in the world state, the effective throughput drops drastically. We therefore propose XOX: a novel two-pronged transaction execution approach that both minimizes invalid transactions in the Fabric blockchain and maximizes concurrent execution. Our approach additionally prevents unintentional denial of service attacks by clients re-submitting conflicting transactions. Even under fully contentious workloads, XOX can handle more than 3000 transactions per second, all of which would be discarded by regular Fabric.

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arXiv2020

Consentio: Managing Consent to Data Access using Permissioned Blockchains

The increasing amount of personal data is raising serious issues in the context of privacy, security, and data ownership. Entities whose data are being collected can benefit from mechanisms to manage the parties that can access their data and to audit who has accessed their data. Consent management systems address these issues. We present Consentio, a scalable consent management system based on the Hyperledger Fabric permissioned blockchain. The data management challenge we address is to ensure high throughput and low latency of endorsing data access requests and granting or revoking consent. Experimental results show that our system can handle as many as 6,000 access requests per second, allowing it to scale to very large deployments.

cs.DC↗

arXiv2019

Errata Note: Discovering Order Dependencies through Order Compatibility

A number of extensions to the classical notion of functional dependencies have been proposed to express and enforce application semantics. One of these extensions is that of order dependencies (ODs), which express rules involving order. The article entitled "Discovering Order Dependencies through Order Compatibility" by Consonni et al., published in the EDBT conference proceedings in March 2019, investigates the OD discovery problem. They claim to prove that their OD discovery algorithm, OCDDISCOVER, is complete, as well as being significantly more efficient in practice than the state-of-the-art. They further claim that the implementation of the existing FASTOD algorithm (ours)-we shared our code base with the authors-which they benchmark against is flawed, as OCDDISCOVER and FASTOD report different sets of ODs over the same data sets. In this rebuttal, we show that their claim of completeness is, in fact, not true. Built upon their incorrect claim, OCDDISCOVER's pruning rules are overly aggressive, and prune parts of the search space that contain legitimate ODs. This is the reason their approach appears to be "faster" in practice. Finally, we show that Consonni et al. misinterpret our set-based canonical form for ODs, leading to an incorrect claim that our FASTOD implementation has an error.

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arXiv2019

Distributed Dependency Discovery

We analyze the problem of discovering dependencies from distributed big data. Existing (non-distributed) algorithms focus on minimizing computation by pruning the search space of possible dependencies. However, distributed algorithms must also optimize communication costs, especially in shared-nothing settings, leading to a more complex optimization space. To understand this space, we introduce six primitives shared by existing dependency discovery algorithms, corresponding to data processing steps separated by communication barriers. Through case studies, we show how the primitives allow us to analyze the design space and develop communication-optimized implementations. Finally, we support our analysis with an experimental evaluation on real datasets.

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arXiv2019

FastFabric: Scaling Hyperledger Fabric to 20,000 Transactions per Second

Blockchain technologies are expected to make a significant impact on a variety of industries. However, one issue holding them back is their limited transaction throughput, especially compared to established solutions such as distributed database systems. In this paper, we re-architect a modern permissioned blockchain system, Hyperledger Fabric, to increase transaction throughput from 3,000 to 20,000 transactions per second. We focus on performance bottlenecks beyond the consensus mechanism, and we propose architectural changes that reduce computation and I/O overhead during transaction ordering and validation to greatly improve throughput. Notably, our optimizations are fully plug-and-play and do not require any interface changes to Hyperledger Fabric.

cs.DC↗

arXiv2016

Authority-based Team Discovery in Social Networks

Given a social network of experts, we address the problem of discovering a team of experts that collectively holds a set of skills required to complete a given project. Most prior work ranks possible solutions by communication cost, represented by edge weights in the expert network. Our contribution is to take experts authority into account, represented by node weights. We formulate several problems that combine communication cost and authority, we prove that they are NP-hard, and we propose and experimentally evaluate greedy algorithms to solve them.

cs.SI↗

arXiv2016

Effective and Complete Discovery of Order Dependencies via Set-based Axiomatization

Integrity constraints (ICs) provide a valuable tool for expressing and enforcing application semantics. However, formulating constraints manually requires domain expertise, is prone to human errors, and may be excessively time consuming, especially on large datasets. Hence, proposals for automatic discovery have been made for some classes of ICs, such as functional dependencies (FDs), and recently, order dependencies (ODs). ODs properly subsume FDs, as they can additionally express business rules involving order; e.g., an employee never has a higher salary while paying lower taxes compared with another employee. We address the limitations of prior work on OD discovery which has factorial complexity in the number of attributes, is incomplete (i.e., it does not discover valid ODs that cannot be inferred from the ones found) and is not concise (i.e., it can result in "redundant" discovery and overly large discovery sets). We improve significantly on complexity, offer completeness, and define a compact canonical form. This is based on a novel polynomial mapping to a canonical form for ODs, and a sound and complete set of axioms (inference rules) for canonical ODs. This allows us to develop an efficient set-containment, lattice-driven OD discovery algorithm that uses the inference rules to prune the search space. Our algorithm has exponential worst-case time complexity in the number of attributes and linear complexity in the number of tuples. We prove that it produces a complete, minimal set of ODs (i.e., minimal with regards to the canonical representation). Finally, using real and synthetic datasets, we experimentally show orders-of-magnitude performance improvements over the current state-of-the-art algorithm and demonstrate effectiveness of our techniques.

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arXiv2016

Effective Keyword Search in Graphs

In a node-labeled graph, keyword search finds subtrees of the graph whose nodes contain all of the query keywords. This provides a way to query graph databases that neither requires mastery of a query language such as SPARQL, nor a deep knowledge of the database schema. Previous work ranks answer trees using combinations of structural and content-based metrics, such as path lengths between keywords or relevance of the labels in the answer tree to the query keywords. We propose two new ways to rank keyword search results over graphs. The first takes node importance into account while the second is a bi-objective optimization of edge weights and node importance. Since both of these problems are NP-hard, we propose greedy algorithms to solve them, and experimentally verify their effectiveness and efficiency on a real dataset.

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arXiv2013

Distributed Data Placement via Graph Partitioning

With the widespread use of shared-nothing clusters of servers, there has been a proliferation of distributed object stores that offer high availability, reliability and enhanced performance for MapReduce-style workloads. However, relational workloads cannot always be evaluated efficiently using MapReduce without extensive data migrations, which cause network congestion and reduced query throughput. We study the problem of computing data placement strategies that minimize the data communication costs incurred by typical relational query workloads in a distributed setting. Our main contribution is a reduction of the data placement problem to the well-studied problem of {\sc Graph Partitioning}, which is NP-Hard but for which efficient approximation algorithms exist. The novelty and significance of this result lie in representing the communication cost exactly and using standard graphs instead of hypergraphs, which were used in prior work on data placement that optimized for different objectives (not communication cost). We study several practical extensions of the problem: with load balancing, with replication, with materialized views, and with complex query plans consisting of sequences of intermediate operations that may be computed on different servers. We provide integer linear programs (IPs) that may be used with any IP solver to find an optimal data placement. For the no-replication case, we use publicly available graph partitioning libraries (e.g., METIS) to efficiently compute nearly-optimal solutions. For the versions with replication, we introduce two heuristics that utilize the {\sc Graph Partitioning} solution of the no-replication case. Using the TPC-DS workload, it may take an IP solver weeks to compute an optimal data placement, whereas our reduction produces nearly-optimal solutions in seconds.

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arXiv2012

On the Relative Trust between Inconsistent Data and Inaccurate Constraints

Functional dependencies (FDs) specify the intended data semantics while violations of FDs indicate deviation from these semantics. In this paper, we study a data cleaning problem in which the FDs may not be completely correct, e.g., due to data evolution or incomplete knowledge of the data semantics. We argue that the notion of relative trust is a crucial aspect of this problem: if the FDs are outdated, we should modify them to fit the data, but if we suspect that there are problems with the data, we should modify the data to fit the FDs. In practice, it is usually unclear how much to trust the data versus the FDs. To address this problem, we propose an algorithm for generating non-redundant solutions (i.e., simultaneous modifications of the data and the FDs) corresponding to various levels of relative trust. This can help users determine the best way to modify their data and/or FDs to achieve consistency.

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