iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Natacha Crooks @nacrooks.bsky.social · 04/06/2025

PSA: Following a sample of my latest teaching review: "Prof Crooks's accent is somewhat distracting. I think it's something to do with the rise in pitch at the end of a sentence". I will now be adopting a Texas drawl in honour of my UT PhD. Please bear with me as I perfect it over the next year.

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Michael Clemens @mclem.org · 27/05/2025

The US Administration has indefinitely blocked *all* student visa applicants from getting a visa interview. Worldwide, unconditional, no end date. All. International students are crucial to the US university system, American innovation, and future US prosperity.

forbes.com

Rubio Reportedly Pauses New International Student Visa Interviews

More than 1.1 million international students were enrolled at U.S. colleges and universities in the 2023-2024 school year.

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Patrick Chovanec @prchovanec.bsky.social · 28/05/2025

They’re basically just trying to kill off US higher education as an industry at this point. Even a delay will pose a critical decision for thousands of prospective students whose futures are now in the air.

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Irene Zhang @schemeprincess.bsky.social · 24/03/2025

It’s that time of the year again, when the air smells fresh, the flowers are blooming and systems researchers are in a windowless room because it’s the SOSP deadline! I wrote these hints on writing an SOSP paper some time ago but it’s still a great reference. irenezhang.net/blog/2021/06...

irenezhang.net

Irene Y. Zhang: Hints on how to write an SOSP paper

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Natacha Crooks @nacrooks.bsky.social · 18/02/2025

Very grateful to be part of the 2025 Sloan Research Fellow cohort. Thank you my fantastic students and amazing colleagues who have made this possible! Many of them will be graduating soon. Hire them!

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Pınar Tözün @pinartozun.bsky.social · 10/02/2025

📢📢VLDB26 (@vldb.bsky.social) will have a ShadowPC! Apply at forms.office.com/e/XYihKj4UKq by March 1! Great opportunity for folk who are new to the data management community & want to gain paper reviewing experience. More info at application form. Chairs: @zistvan.bsky.social, Tianzheng Wang, & I.

forms.office.com

Microsoft Forms

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Natacha Crooks @nacrooks.bsky.social · 10/02/2025

Anyone currently applying for a green card seeing their estimated processing time creep up significantly?

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Alex Miller @alexmillerdb.bsky.social · 08/02/2025

I wanted to go through the rest of the disaggregated OLTP papers in detail, as I'd missed a few, so I'm re-reading everything and incrementally filling in more papers on transactional.blog/notes-on/dis... Recent additions are overviews for Aurora Serverless and PolarFS.

transactional.blog

Notes On: Disaggregated OLTP Systems

Aurora, Socrates, PolarDB, and Taurus.

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Marc Brooker @marcbrooker.bsky.social · 06/02/2025

Continuing from yesterday's blog post, today I look at an interesting isolation edge-case from the literature: Fekete's Anomaly. How does it fit in to our theme of achieving performance, scalability, and reliability through reducing coordination? New blog post here: brooker.co.za/blog/2025/02...

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Natacha Crooks @nacrooks.bsky.social · 28/01/2025

Well this is going to make work interesting ...

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Christina Areizaga Barbieri, Ph.D. @cabarbieri.bsky.social · 27/01/2025

I’m an NSF panel reviewer that was scheduled to meet today. Just got notice that all NSF panels were canceled today. I reviewed some innovative proposals in support of students. Devastating if these scholars don’t get to do this work. For the love of science & students I hope this is just a delay.💔

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Andy Pavlo @andypavlo.bsky.social · 16/01/2025

Spring 2025 @cmudb.bsky.social Course: OPTIMIZE! A Journey Through Database Query Optimization This is a survey course on how to build a SQL optimizer from scratch covering foundational and state-of-the-art implementations. All lectures available on YouTube: 15799.courses.cs.cmu.edu/spring2025/

15799.courses.cs.cmu.edu

CMU 15-799 :: Special Topics in Databases: Query Optimization (Spring 2025)

This course is a hands-on exploration of the most challenging problem in computer science: database query optimization. It will cover the classical and state-of-the-art methods and algorithms for conv...

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Natacha Crooks @nacrooks.bsky.social · 18/01/2025

A poodle, a latte, California sun and @andypavlo.bsky.social's new query optimizer lecture course. Not a bad start to a Saturday morning walk.

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Natacha Crooks @nacrooks.bsky.social · 13/01/2025

Female colleagues in CS: how often a year do you get mistaken for one of your male colleagues' secretary? I'm already at one this year and it's not even Feb! PS: you don't want me coordinating your calendar. I will accidentally double book you and schedule 7 am meetings.

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Natacha Crooks @nacrooks.bsky.social · 20/12/2024

Dear Students, as University X require me to rate your artistitic ability, and University Y require me to rate your competency in a foreign language. I henceforth require all meetings to be conducted in French while dancing a cèilidh as a precondition to me writing a reference. Thank you.

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Marc Brooker @marcbrooker.bsky.social · 18/12/2024

New blog post, diving a little deeper on Snapshot Isolation and Serializability, through the lens of the coordination required to implement them: brooker.co.za/blog/2024/12...

brooker.co.za

Snapshot Isolation vs Serializability - Marc's Blog

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Natacha Crooks @nacrooks.bsky.social · 15/12/2024

There is a special place in hell for schools that require you to rate applicants across 10 axes for recommendation letters and don't just let you upload the standard PDF.

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Martin Kleppmann @martin.kleppmann.com · 06/12/2024

The PaPoC workshop is once again accepting submissions on distributed consistency. Deadline 15 January papoc-workshop.github.io/2025/cfp.html

papoc-workshop.github.io

Call for Papers

The 12th Workshop on Principles and Practice of Consistency for Distributed Data

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Hannes Mühleisen @hannes.muehleisen.org · 13/12/2024

I was recently on a panel on "What are important data systems problems, ignored by research?" with @andypavlo.bsky.social and Allison Lee moderated by Viktor Leis - here is the write-up of the discussion databasearchitects.blogspot.com/2024/12/what...

databasearchitects.blogspot.com

What are important data systems problems, ignored by research?

A blog by and for database architects.

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SIGMOD/PODS Conference @sigmodconf.bsky.social · 13/12/2024

🛬🛂if you are planning to come to SIGMOD in Berlin, make sure to meet your corresponding visa and travel requirements in a timely manner. We have now curated the relevant links to official websites. 2025.sigmod.org/visa.shtml

2025.sigmod.org

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Natacha Crooks @nacrooks.bsky.social · 12/12/2024

I am disappointed to see that Brown no longer requires me to rate the artistic ability of the people I am recommending me for PhD admissions in CS. I was enjoying the mandatory tap dancing interview prior to agreeing to write them a letter.

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Natacha Crooks @nacrooks.bsky.social · 09/12/2024

One of the biggest difference between faculty life and student life is deadlines. Deadlines for students are more intense. Feels like all or nothing, all eggs in one project. But then you can relax. I find myself having to delay all *other* important things to Wednesday or Thursday, no rest allowed

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Natacha Crooks @nacrooks.bsky.social · 08/12/2024

Academic Twitter, a (very strong) Iranian student is telling me that he cannot afford the PhD application fee at Berkeley (155$, a month of his father's salary he says). Are there any solutions to request application fee waivers for international students in this situation? Which schools allow it?

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Natacha Crooks @nacrooks.bsky.social · 06/12/2024

I guess nobody said submitting to Osdi would be easy. But trying to reason through BFT proofs with a fever and one eye on the tsunami watch website, is just a little *too* hard.

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Nikhil Benesch @benesch.bsky.social · 04/12/2024

S3 (Iceberg) Tables is everything I dreamt of, and more. I blogged some long-form thoughts: meltware.com/2024/12/04/s... I think we're about to see an explosion of data tools (@materialize.com, @clickhouse.com, @duckdb.org, et al.) learn to write Iceberg tables via S3 table buckets. #databs

meltware.com

A First Look at S3 (Iceberg) Tables

AWS announced S3 Tables today, which brings native support for Apache Iceberg to S3. It’s hard to overstate how exciting this is for the data analytics ecosystem. This post is a quick rundown of my th...

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Divanilson Rodrigo Campelo @dcampelo.bsky.social · 02/12/2024

Cornell, Maryland, Max Planck Pre-doctoral Research School in Computer Science (CMMRS) is now open for applications cmmrs.mpi-sws.org Two students of my team attended the 2022 and 2024 editions and I strongly recommend.

cmmrs.mpi-sws.org

The Cornell, Maryland, Max Planck Pre-doctoral Research School in Computer Science (CMMRS 2025)

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Martin Kleppmann @martin.kleppmann.com · 01/12/2024

I will henceforth also describe myself as “technically just a slow database”. My publisher would probably add “is a PITA to query”

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Natacha Crooks @nacrooks.bsky.social · 01/12/2024

This post was read while procrastinating from writing a recommendation letter.

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Martin Kleppmann @martin.kleppmann.com · 30/11/2024

Seems like a safe bet that object storage as a foundation of data systems architecture is here to stay blog.colinbreck.com/predicting-t...

blog.colinbreck.com

Predicting the Future of Distributed Systems

There are significant changes happening in distributed systems.

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Natacha Crooks @nacrooks.bsky.social · 29/11/2024

When OSDI and VLDB deadline pushes clash with family and puppy time. Multitask!

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Sam Kumar @samkumar.bsky.social · 28/11/2024

This admissions cycle, I am recruiting PhD students to join my research group! If you're interested in systems or security (including intersections with cryptography, datacenters, AI, etc.), then please apply to UCLA Computer Science and list me on your application as a potential faculty advisor.

Royce Hall, UCLA.
Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Royce_Hall_Facade.JPG [Josh Lee, CC BY-SA 3.0]

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Qian Li @qianli.dev · 25/11/2024

I like this paper because it’s a good example of database and OS co-design. A great blog post from @marcbrooker.bsky.social on this: brooker.co.za/blog/2024/07...

brooker.co.za

Resource Management in Aurora Serverless - Marc's Blog

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Natacha Crooks @nacrooks.bsky.social · 26/11/2024

My feed is full of discussion/posts about consistency and isolation levels, and devoid of far-right bots making hateful comments. How I'd forgotten how nice it feels. It's the small things in life.

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David Andersen @daveandersen.bsky.social · 22/11/2024

I am very happy that Carnegie Mellon is one of these schools. (And I hope that in future years we can raise the threshold.)

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Natacha Crooks @nacrooks.bsky.social · 19/11/2024

My office is sufficient cold this morning that I am wearing my PhD gown for warmth. Who said a PhD wasn't useful?

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Natacha Crooks @nacrooks.bsky.social · 18/11/2024

I hope that the whole of academic twitter and mastodont reunites. I miss alternating between discussions of multiversioned timestamp ordering in databases and pictures of my dog.

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