Events

CS Colloquium: Machine Learning in Production Database Systems

Speaker: Vikram Nathan (AWS)

Location: 60 Fifth Avenue, Room 150
Videoconference link: https://nyu.zoom.us/j/96775092031

Date: Wednesday, October 23, 2024

The database community has seen a flurry of recent work integrating machine
learning components into data management systems, but deploying these
techniques in production without a human in the loop has seen mixed
results. What’s missing when we try to translate research into practice?
And how should that inform how we approach ML + Systems research? This
talk will attempt to answer these questions through the lens of the
speaker’s experience deploying ML-based Intelligent Scaling (named RAIS) at
Amazon Redshift, a cloud data warehouse offered by AWS. RAIS automatically
and proactively adjusts the capacity of a customer’s Redshift cluster based
on workload patterns and predicted query complexity, with the goal of
offering a price-performance tradeoff suited to each customer. The talk
will cover the design of RAIS, the challenges in designing a production
system that relies heavily on imperfect predictions, and new research
directions that arise from it.