Eugene Wu

Bio

Eugene Wu is broadly interested in technologies that help users play with their data. His goal is for users at all technical levels to effectively and quickly make sense of their information. He is interested in solutions that ultimately improve the interface between users and data, and uses techniques borrowed from fields such as data management, systems, crowd sourcing, visualization, and HCI. Eugene Wu received his Ph.D. from MIT, B.S. from Cal, and was a postdoc in the AMPLab. A profile, an obit.

Eugene Wu has received the VLDB 2018 10-year test of time award, best-of-conference citations at ICDE and VLDB, the SIGMOD 2016 best demo award, the NSF CAREER, and the Google and Amazon faculty awards.

The WuLab Website & Blog

Overview of My Research and Teaching

Joining The Lab
PhDs and Postdocs: read recent papers, email me with thoughts on extensions, and include "bananas" in the subject line.
Interns + UGrad + Masters read the list of projects looking for help.

Info

ewu@cs.columbia.edu
421 Mudd, 500 W 120th St
Twitter: @sirrice
Github: sirrice, cudbg
OH: Thurs 12-1PM EST 421 Mudd
CV

Co-Chair: Data, Media & Society
Advisor: Journalism + CS Dual Degree
Member: Columbia DB, Columbia CS, DSI

Support: NSF 1527765, 1564049, 1845638 (CAREER), 1740305, 2008295, 2106197, 2103794, Amazon, Google, Columbia SIRS


Recent News

  • May-2022: SIGMOD 2023 is next month! We have exciting work on a Data Interface Grammar, how to detect and avoid logical errors in semantic layers, CPU-GPU acceleration for In-DBMS machine learning, a suite of XTutor visualization libraries for data education, and the OM3 progressively encoded data structure for fast and massive-scale time series visualizations!
  • Dec-2022: Zachary recieved the Columbia Data Science Institute’s Avanessian PhD fellowship!
  • Sep-2022: IEEE VIS 2022 is next month! Excited to present our work on generating fully interactive interface from natural language questions at the nlviz workshop, our recommendations for how to write captions for data visualizations at the viscomm workshop, and our new formalism and interaction design for ad hoc comparisons at the main conference!
  • Aug-2022: A nice Columbia Engineering article about our research to help insure African farmers from droughts and floods.
  • Jun-2022: SIGMOD 2022 is this week! We are presenting 3 full papers, 1 DEEM workshop paper, 2 demos, and student research competition posters! We summarize this work in our SIGMOD 22 Blog post!
  • Mar-2022: PI2 is the first system that generates fully interactive visualization analysis interfaces from queries. We are excited to present it at SIGMOD 2022!
  • Feb-2022: Excited to have been recommended for tenure at Columbia University!
  • Feb-2022: our paper View Composition Algebra for Ad hoc Comparisons was accepted to TVCG 2022 and will be presented at VIS later this year.
  • Jan-2022: 2 more paper acceptances to SIGMOD 2022: our demo paper Interactive Interface Generation in Notebooks extends jupyter to automatically generate interactive analysis interfaces during SQL analysis, and our full paper Complaint-Driven Training Data Debugging at Interactive Speeds enables training data debugging by simply identifying errors in analytic results in milliseconds!
  • Jan-2022: FLAWLESS VICTORY! Our mortal kombat-themed system, Reptile reformulates data cleaning as a top-down iterative process. It has been used in Zambia and Ethiopia to clean nation-wide farmer survey data in order to design their national drought insurance policies. Zachary will present it at SIGMOD 2022.
  • Older News

All Publications (Show Selected)

  1. A Grammar for Hypothesis-Driven Visual Analysis
    Ashley Suh, Yilan Jiang, Ab Mosca, Eugene Wu, Remco Chang
    ArXiV 2022
  2. PI2: Generating Visual Analysis Interfaces From Queries
    Yiru Chen, Eugene Wu
    SIGMOD 2022
  3. View Composition Algebra for Ad Hoc Comparisons
    Eugene Wu
    TVCG 2022
  4. Complaint-Driven Training Data Debugging at Interactive Speeds
    Lampros Flokas, Young Wu, Jiannan Wang, Nakul Verma, Eugene Wu
    SIGMOD 2022
  5. Explaining SQL-ML Queries with Bayesian Optimization
    Brandon Lockhard, Jiannan Wang, Eugene Wu
    VLDB 2021
  6. From Cleaning Before ML to Cleaning For ML
    Felix Neutatz, Binger Chen, Ziawasch Abedjan, Eugene Wu
    Invited, IEEE Data Engineering Bulletin 2021
  7. Continuous Prefetch for Interactive Data Applications
    Haneen Mohammed, Ziyun Wei, Ravi Netravali, Eugene Wu
    VLDB 2020 Talk Video Blogpost
  8. Complaint-driven Training Data Debugging for Query 2.0
    Young Wu, Lampros Flokas, Jiannan Wang, Eugene Wu
    SIGMOD 2020 Talk Video Blogpost
  9. Monte Carlo Tree Search for Generating Interactive Data Analysis Interfaces
    Yiru Chen, Eugene Wu
    Intelligent Process Automation (IPA) 2020
  10. AlphaClean: Automatic Generation of Data Cleaning Pipelines
    Sanjay Krishnan, Eugene Wu
    ArXiv 2019
  11. Towards Democratizing Relational Data Visualization
    Nan Tang, Eugene Wu, Guoliang Li
    SIGMOD 2019 Tutorial
  12. Precision Interfaces
    Qianrui Zhang, Haoci Zhang, Viraj Rai, Thibault Sellam, Eugene Wu
    SIGMOD 2019
  13. DeepBase: Deep Inspection of Neural Networks
    Thibault Sellam, Kevin Lin, Ian Yiran Huang, Michelle Yang, Carl Vondrick, Eugene Wu
    SIGMOD 2019
  14. Ten Years of Web Tables
    Michael Cafarella, Alon Halevy, Daisy Zhe Wang, Hongrae Lee, Jayant Madhavan, Cong Yu, Eugene Wu
    PVLDB 2018 Invited Paper,
  15. Provenance in Interactive Visualizations
    Fotis Psallidas, Eugene Wu
    HILDA 2018
  16. Leveraging Quality Prediction Models for Automatic Writing Feedback
    Hamed Nilforoshan, Eugene Wu
    ICWSM 2018
  17. Smoke: Fine-grained Lineage at Interactive Speeds
    Fotis Psallidas, Eugene Wu
    VLDB 2018
  18. Combining Design and Performance in a Data Visualization Management System
    Eugene Wu, Fotis Psallidas, Zhengjie Miao, Haoci Zhang, Laura Rettig, Yifan Wu, Thibault Sellam
    CIDR 2017
  19. QFix: Diagnosing errors through query histories
    Xiaolan Wang, Alexandra Meliou, Eugene Wu
    SIGMOD 2017
  20. PFunk-H: Approximate Query Processing using Perceptual Models
    Daniel Alabi, Eugene Wu
    HILDA 2016
  21. ActiveClean: Interactive Data Cleaning While Learning Convex Loss Models
    Sanjay Krishnan, Jiannan Wang, Eugene Wu, Michael J. Franklin, Ken Goldberg
    Arxiv 2016
  22. Explaining Data in Visual Analytic Systems
    Eugene Wu
    Doctoral Thesis 2015
  23. The Case for Data Visualization Management Systems
    Eugene Wu, Leilani Battle, Samuel Madden
    VLDB 2014
  24. Scorpion: Explaining Away Outliers in Aggregate Queries
    Eugene Wu, Samuel Madden
    VLDB 2013 (Best-of) Slides
  25. SubZero: a Fine-Grained Lineage System for Scientific Databases
    Eugene Wu, Samuel Madden, Michael Stonebraker
    ICDE 2013 (Best-of)
  26. Human-powered Sorts and Joins
    Adam Marcus, Eugene Wu, David Karger, Samuel Madden, Robert Miller
    VLDB 2012
  27. Relational Cloud: A Database-as-a-Service for the Cloud
    Carlo Curino, Evan Jones, Raluca Popa, Nirmesh Malviya, Eugene Wu, Sam Madden, Hari Balakrishnan, Nickolai Zeldovich
    CIDR 2011
  28. High-performance complex event processing over streams
    Eugene Wu, Yanlei Diao, Shariq Rizvi
    SIGMOD 2006

Phds and PostDocs

Haneen Mohammed
Yiru Chen
Zach Huang
Charlie Summers
Jiaxiang “Jerry” Liu
Haonan “Peter” Wang

Lampros Flokas (PhD, Meta)
Fotis Psallidas (PhD, Microsoft)
Thibault Sellam (postdoc, Google)

See WuLab for full list

Masters Question

Current Student? See if Professor Verma’s FAQ page answers your questions.

Questions about the CS Journalism dual degree? See the FAQ

Teaching

Service

Organizer/Co-Chair ICDE Workshops (2023), SIGMOD Student Research Competition (2019, 2020), NYDBDay (2018), HILDA (2018), SIGMOD NRS (2017), SIGMOD Travel Award (2015, 2016), North East DB Day (2016)

Area Chair ICDE (2017), VLDB (2021, 2022)

Program Committee WWW (2017), SIGMOD (2017, 2019, 2023), VLDB (2017, 2020), VLDB PhD Workshop (2020), SOCC (2021, 2022), HILDA (2016, 2017, 2020, 2022), SSDBM (2017), HCOMP (2017), CLOUDDM (2016) DATA4U (2014)

Reviewer SIGMOD, VLDB, CIDR, SOCC, WWW, ICDE, VIS, UIST, CHI, TKDE

2014 Job Materials

Old CV, Research, Teaching, Diversity

Side Projects

Latex Snapshots goes through your latex repo’s history and renders thumbnails of your pdf

VLDB conference trends renders a history of databases through keyword trends in VLDB publication titles

pygg is a python wrapper around ggplot2 that provides nearly the same syntax, but in python.

bibcleaner is a web UI to normalize and clean up bibtex entries, and help shorten the references section

dbtruck imports your data into postgres you want, as painlessly as possible.

researchsetup is a set of recommendations to bootstrap your research.

I sometimes doodle

Mortal Kombat Papers