Time: Fridays, noon - 1:05pm (PT)
Location: The Internet / The LSD Lab (Engineering 2, Room 398)
Organizers: Lindsey Kuper, Tyler Sorensen, Reese Levine, and Achilles Benetopoulos
The Languages, Systems, and Data Seminar meets weekly to discuss interesting topics in the areas of programming languages, systems, databases, formal methods, security, software engineering, verification, architecture, and beyond. Our goal is to encourage interactions and discussions between students, researchers, and faculty with interests in these areas. The seminar is open to everyone interested. Participating UCSC students should register for the 2-credit course CSE 280O (let the organizers know if you’re an undergrad and need a permission code).
For spring 2026, we will continue to host the LSD Seminar in a hybrid fashion. Anyone can attend on Zoom, and local folks can gather in person in the lab. Speakers can join either in person or on Zoom, whichever is convenient.
Talks will be advertised on the ucsc-lsd-seminar-announce (for anyone) and lsd-group (for UCSC-affiliated people) mailing lists.
| Date | Speaker | Title |
|---|---|---|
| April 3 | No Speaker | Social Hour |
| April 10 | Audrey Cheng | Rethinking Database Optimization for Modern Workloads |
| April 17 | Achilles Benetopoulos | Conference Practice Talk |
| April 24 | Liza Pertseva | TBD |
| May 1 | TBD | TBD |
| May 8 | Nikos Pagonas | TBD |
| May 15 | Micah Murray | TBD |
| May 22 | Thalia Archibald | UNIX V4: History and Recovery |
| May 29 | TBD | TBD |
| June 5 | Scott Kovach | TBD |
April 3
Speaker: No Speaker
Social Hour in place of talk.
April 10
Speaker: Audrey Cheng
Title: Rethinking Database Optimization for Modern Workloads
Abstract: Data systems face unprecedented scalability demands as modern applications, especially AI workloads, evolve rapidly. These shifts make it increasingly difficult to maintain both performance and correctness, which are the core properties that databases must provide. In this talk, I discuss how to rethink database optimization by exploiting workload semantics in modern large-scale applications and how we can scale these efforts by automating this optimization with AI. First, I will present my work on reducing data contention, which remains a crucial performance bottleneck, by leveraging contention patterns in modern workloads. My research addresses this challenge via transaction scheduling: instead of resolving conflicts after they occur, I focus on preventing them by reordering transactions to avoid conflicts before execution. I will then discuss how we build on these results by leveraging AI-driven methods to enable the rapid exploration and generation of optimization methods, with the broader goal of automating performance optimization in data systems.
Bio: Audrey is a PhD student at UC Berkeley, advised by Natacha Crooks and Ion Stoica. Her research focuses on performance optimization for database systems. Her work has been deployed in industry databases at Meta, PlanetScale, and TiDB. She was named a Rising Star in EECS and has received an NSF GRFP Fellowship, a Meta Research PhD Fellowship, a Berkeley Chancellor’s Fellowship, a VLDB Best Industry Paper Award, and invitations to the Best of VLDB journal.
April 17
This week we will have practice talks for upcoming conference presentations.
Achilles Benetopoulos: Yield Not Thy Core, to be presented at EuroSys.
April 24
Speaker: Liza Pertseva
Title: TBD
Abstract: TBD
May 1
Speaker: TBD
Title: TBD
Abstract: TBD
May 8
Speaker: Nikos Pagonas
Title: TBD
Abstract: TBD
May 15
Speaker: Micah Murray
Title: TBD
Abstract: TBD
May 22
Speaker: Thalia Archibald
Title: UNIX V4: History and Recovery
Abstract: TBD
May 29
Speaker: TBD
Title: TBD
Abstract: TBD
June 5
Speaker: Scott Kovach
Title: TBD
Abstract: TBD