About

I am a postdoctoral scholar at UC Berkeley working with Prof. Aditya Parameswaran. I am part of Data Systems and Foundations group, and affiliated with EPIC Data and SKY Computing labs.

Before joining UC Berkeley, I obained my PhD degree in the database group of UChicago, advised by Prof. Aaron Elmore. At UChicago, I'm also fortunate to work with Prof. Sanjay Krishnan and Prof. Michael Franklin.

Research Interest

My current research is supporting user-centered analytical interfaces at scale by reshaping modern data analytical stacks on three aspects:

• Interactivity: how do we help end-users consume visual results with desirable properties and performance preserved?
• Scalability: how do we scale the execution of user-centered analytical interfaces to multiple machines?
• Cost: how do we reduce resource usage while not sacrificing performance?

I am also generally interested in user-centered data management, query processing and optimizations, and cloud databases.

Projects

I am currently working on several exciting projects. The major projects include:

• FormS: a Python library for scalable spreadsheet formula execution
• Transactional Panorama: a conceptual framework for user perception in analytical visual interfaces
• Taco: efficient and compact spreadsheet formula graphs
• Modin: a scalable dataframe system
• Lux: a visualization recommendation library for data scientists to perform easy data exploration in dataframe workflow

In addition, I have also worked on several other projects, including explaining data shift and cleaning police roster data. At UChicago, I work on CrocodileDB, a new database architecture that exploits time slackness to enable new resource-efficient query execution. Please check out this video for an overview of my research on CrocodileDB.

News

2023-02: Our paper "Efficient and Compact Spreadsheet Formula Graphs" is accepted by ICDE 2023

2023-01: The paper for Transactional Panorama is accepted by VLDB 2023

2022-11: I am invited to be a PC member of EDBT 2024

2022-10: I gave a talk about Lux at EPIC Advance

2022-09: I gave a talk at VLDB'22 about our paper "Flexible Rule-Based Decomposition and Metadata Independence in Modin: A Parallel Dataframe System". Please check out the video here.

2022-06: I will attend SIGMOD'22 in person and chair Session 2: Query Processing and Optimization

2021-12: I am invited to be a PC member of SIGMOD 2023

2021-11: I gave a talk about Modin at RISECamp 2021

2021-10: Two papers from Modin and Lux projects are accepted by VLDB 2022

Publications

• Efficient and Compact Spreadsheet Formula Graphs
  Dixin Tang, Fanchao Chen, Christopher De Leon, Tana Wattanawaroon, Jeaseok Yun, Srinivasan Seshadri, Aditya G. Parameswaran
  ICDE 2023 (To appear)
• Transactional Panorama: A Conceptual Framework for User Perception in Analytical Visual Interfaces
  Dixin Tang, Alan Fekete, Indranil Gupta, Aditya G. Parameswaran
  VLDB 2023 (To appear)
• Flexible Rule-Based Decomposition and Metadata Independence in Modin: A Parallel Dataframe System
  Devin Petersohn*, Dixin Tang*, Rehan Durrani, Areg Melik-Adamyan, Joseph E. Gonzalez, Anthony D. Joseph, Aditya G. Parameswaran
  VLDB 2022 (Talk Video, *Equal contribution)
• Lux: Always-on Visualization Recommendations for Exploratory Dataframe Workflows
  Doris Jung-Lin Lee, Dixin Tang, Kunal Agarwal, Thyne Boonmark, Caitlyn Chen, Jake Kang, Ujjaini Mukhopadhyay, Jerry Song, Micah Yong, Marti A. Hearst, Aditya G. Parameswaran
  VLDB 2022
• Enhancing the Interactivity of Dataframe Queries by Leveraging Think Time
  Doris Xin, Devin Petersohn, Dixin Tang, Yifan Wu, Joseph E. Gonzalez, Joseph M. Hellerstein, Anthony D. Joseph, Aditya G. Parameswaran
  IEEE Data Eng. Bull. 2021
• Resource-efficient Shared Query Execution via Exploiting Time Slackness
  Dixin Tang, Zechao Shang, William Ma, Aaron J. Elmore, Sanjay Krishnan
  SIGMOD 2021 (Short talk, Long talk)
• CIAO: An Optimization Framework for Client-Assisted Data Loading
  Cong Ding, Dixin Tang, Xi Liang, Aaron J. Elmore, Sanjay Krishnan
  ICDE 2021, Short paper (Technical Report)
• CrocodileDB in Action: Resource-Efficient Query Execution by Exploiting Time Slackness
  Dixin Tang, Zechao Shang, Aaron J. Elmore, Sanjay Krishnan, Michael J. Franklin
  VLDB 2020, Demo (Talk Video)
• Thrifty Query Execution via Incrementability
  Dixin Tang, Zechao Shang, Aaron J. Elmore, Sanjay Krishnan, Michael J. Franklin
  SIGMOD 2020 (Talk Video)
• CrocodileDB: Efficient Database Execution through Intelligent Deferment
  Zechao Shang, Xi Liang, Dixin Tang, Cong Ding, Aaron J. Elmore, Sanjay Krishnan, Michael J. Franklin
  CIDR 2020
• Intermittent Query Processing
  Dixin Tang, Zechao Shang, Aaron J. Elmore, Sanjay Krishnan, Michael J. Franklin
  VLDB 2019
• Socrates: The New SQL Server in the Cloud
  Panagiotis Antonopoulos, Alex Budovski, Cristian Diaconu, Alejandro Hernandez Saenz, Jack Hu, Hanuma Kodavalla, Donald Kossmann, Sandeep Lingam, Umar Farooq Minhas, Naveen Prakash, Vijendra Purohit, Hugh Qu, Chaitanya Sreenivas Ravella, Krystyna Reisteter, Sheetal Shrotri, Dixin Tang, Vikram Wakade
  SIGMOD 2019
• Toward Coordination-free and Reconfigurable Mixed Concurrency Control
  Dixin Tang, Aaron J. Elmore
  USENIX'ATC 2018 (Talk Video, Technical Report)
• Adaptive Concurrency Control: Despite the Looking Glass, One Concurrency Control Does Not Fit All
  Dixin Tang, Hao Jiang, Aaron J. Elmore
  CIDR 2017

Professional Services

Conference Program Committee: SIGMOD'22, SIGMOD'22 (Demo Track), SIGMOD'23, EDBT'24
Conference Reviewer: IEEE VIS'21
Conference Session Chair: SIGMOD'22
Journal Reviewer: VLDB Journal (2022), Distributed and Parallel Databases Journal (2022)