Post by Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering

#UWAllen alum Kyle Deeds (Ph.D., ‘25) was recently named a runner-up in the ACM SIGMOD Jim Gray Doctoral Dissertation Awards, which recognize excellent research by doctoral candidates in the database field. Deeds was honored for his University of Washington dissertation titled “Data-Aware Complexity Analysis and Program Optimization.” “In everyday computing, there are all kinds of computations whose performance depends on the distribution of the input data. For example, when you send a message in a groupchat, it takes a lot more work if it has a million members than if it has five members, even though the messaging program is the same,” Deeds, incoming faculty member at Boston University Computer Science, explained. “In fact, that program should probably change depending on which kind of data you have," he continued. "However, most traditional ways of optimizing programs (e.g. compilers for languages like C) only consider the structure of the program and not the structure of the data. My dissertation is built on techniques from databases, whose optimizers have always had to consider the data, and showed that we could adapt them to optimize programs in exciting new areas like sparse tensor processing.” Deeds completed his Ph.D. as a member of the UW Database Group working with professors Magdalena Balazinska and Dan Suciu. Read his full dissertation: https://lnkd.in/gqzFunhR University of Washington College of Engineering UW Graduate School UW Alumni Association #UWdiscovers #ComputerScience #optimization #databases #DatabaseTheory #DataManagement #ComplexityAnalysis #PhDlife