Neil Conway

I'm a third-year PhD student in Computer Science at the University of California, Berkeley. My advisor is Joe Hellerstein. My research focuses on distributed systems, logic programming, and data management for large data sets. Recent work includes MapReduce Online and the Berkeley Orders of Magnitude (BOOM) Project.

In the past, I've contributed to the development of the PostgreSQL database system. I was also an early employee at Truviso, a stream processing company. I received my undergraduate degree in Computer Science from Queen's University in 2007.

You might want to read my blog or follow me on Twitter.

Contact

nrc AT cs DOT berkeley DOT edu
$first DOT $last AT gmail DOT com
LinkedIn Profile
You can also find me in Soda Hall, room 773.

Publications

• P. Alvaro, T. Condie, N. Conway, K. Elmeleegy, J. M. Hellerstein, R. Sears. BOOM Analytics: Exploring Data-Centric, Declarative Programming for the Cloud. Proceedings of the European Conference on Computer Systems (EuroSys), 2010.
• T. Condie, N. Conway, P. Alvaro, J. M. Hellerstein, K. Elmeleegy, R. Sears. MapReduce Online. Proceedings of the USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI), 2010.
• K. Chen, H. Chen, N. Conway, J. M. Hellerstein, T. S. Parikh. Usher: Improving Data Quality With Dynamic Forms. Proceedings of the International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE), 2010 (Best Student Paper).
• P. Alvaro, T. Condie, N. Conway, J. M. Hellerstein, R. Sears. I Do Declare: Consensus in a Logic Language. Proceedings of the SOSP Workshop on Networking Meets Databases (NetDB), 2009.
• M. J. Franklin, S. Krishnamurthy, N. Conway, A. Li, A. Russakovsky, N. Thombre. Continuous Analytics: Rethinking Query Processing in a Network-Effect World. CIDR 2009 (Perspectives Track).

Demos and Posters

• T. Condie, N. Conway, P. Alvaro, J. M. Hellerstein, J. Gerth, J. Talbot, K. Elmeleegy, R. Sears. Online Aggregation and Continuous Query support in MapReduce. SIGMOD 2010 (Demo Track).
• K. Chen, H. Chen, N. Conway, H. Dolan, J. M. Hellerstein, T. S. Parikh. Improving Data Quality with Dynamic Forms. Demo abstract in Proceedings of IEEE/ACM ICTD 2009.

Technical Reports and Theses

• P. Alvaro, W. R. Marczak, N. Conway, J. M. Hellerstein, D. Maier, R. Sears. Dedalus: Datalog in Time and Space.
• N. Conway. Transactions and Data Stream Processing. B. Sc. Thesis (May 2007), Queen's University.

Talks

• May 2010: Dedalus: Datalog in Time and Space (Berkeley OSQ Retreat)
• April 2010: BOOM Analytics: Exploring Data-Centric, Declarative Programming for the Cloud (EuroSys'10)
• March 2010: Cloud Programming: From Doom and Gloom to BOOM and Bloom (Datalog 2.0 Workshop)
• December 2009: MapReduce Online
• November 2009: Cloud Programming: From Doom and Gloom to BOOM and Bloom
• April 2009: BOOM: Data-Centric Programming For The Data Center (Stanford InfoLunch)
• October 2007: Query Execution Techniques in PostgreSQL
• June 2006, May 2007: Introduction to Hacking PostgreSQL (tutorial)
• May 2007: Introduction to Data Stream Query Processing
• September 2006: TelegraphCQ: A Data Stream Management System
• May 2005: Inside the PostgreSQL Query Optimizer

Other Content

• Documents
  • Technical Report on Slony II (draft, deprecated)
  • FAQ: Sequence Usage in PostgreSQL
• Software
  • C4
  • Hadoop Online Prototype (HOP)
  • Java Overlog Library (JOL)
  • rb_spread 2.0 — Ruby bindings for the Spread GCS client API.
  • pgmemcache — PostgreSQL interface to libmemcache (which is itself a C language interface to memcached).
  • PostgreSQL
• School
  • Various notes on DBMS internals
    • Written to prepare for an exam in a DBMS internals class I was taking at the time (2003). Covers basic techniques for query evaluation, query optimization, concurrency control and recovery.
  • Introduction to Kolmogorov Complexity
    • A 45-minute talk that introduces the basic properties of Kolmogorov complexity, and highlights some interesting applications. Note that I'm by no means an expert on algorithmic information theory, so take this for what it's worth.