Publications
Our teams aspire to make discoveries that impact everyone, and core to our approach is sharing our research and tools to fuel progress in the field.
Our teams aspire to make discoveries that impact everyone, and core to our approach is sharing our research and tools to fuel progress in the field.
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1 - 15 of 10270 publications
SSDTrain: Faster Large Language Model Training Using SSD-Based Activation Offloading
Mert Hidayetoğlu
Steven Lumetta
Kun Wu
Sitao Huang
Jeongmin Brian Park
Wen-mei Hwu
Vikram Sharma Mailthody
Design Automation Conference (DAC) (2025)
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The scaling up of Large Language Models (LLMs) demands more memory than current GPUs can provide, hindering the training process. To address this challenge, we propose SSDTrain to efficiently offload activations, the intermediate tensors produced during LLM training, to SSDs. This approach reduces GPU memory usage without impacting performance by adaptively overlapping data transfers with computation. SSDTrain is compatible with popular deep learning frameworks like PyTorch, Megatron, and DeepSpeed, and it employs techniques such as tensor deduplication, forwarding, and adaptive offloading to further enhance efficiency. We conduct extensive experiments on Llama, BERT, and T5. Results demonstrate that SSDTrain effectively reduces 45% of the activation peak memory usage. It can perfectly overlap the IO with the computation without introducing performance penalty. SSDTrain can achieve a performance boost of up to 31% compared to the conventional training strategy using the same GPU systems.
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A Strategic Framework for AI Product Development and Evaluation in Enterprise Software
International Journal of Computer Engineering and Technology (IJCET), Volume 16, Issue 1 (2025)
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This article presents a comprehensive framework for developing and evaluating AI products in enterprise software systems, addressing the critical challenges organizations face during AI transformation initiatives. The article introduces a structured approach to decision-making for AI integration, encompassing ROI evaluation, user value assessment, and business impact analysis. It establishes distinct methodologies for both assistive and autonomous AI systems, providing detailed metrics for measuring success and performance across different implementation scenarios. Across various industries, the framework has shown potential in reducing implementation time, increasing user adoption rates, and enhancing overall project success rates, highlighting its practical applicability. The article methodology combines theoretical analysis with practical case studies, resulting in a flexible yet robust framework that can adapt to various organizational contexts. The framework's primary contribution lies in its practical approach to bridging the gap between theoretical AI capabilities and real-world implementation challenges, offering product leaders a systematic methodology for AI product development and evaluation. By addressing both current implementation challenges and future scalability requirements, this framework provides organizations with a foundational tool for navigating their AI transformation journey while maintaining a focus on measurable business outcomes and user value creation.
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Gemini & Physical World: Large Language Models Can Estimate the Intensity of Earthquake Shaking from Multi-Modal Social Media Posts
Aman Raj
Marc Stogaitis
Youngmin Cho
Richard Allen
Patrick Robertson
Robert Bosch
Nivetha Thiruverahan
Alexei Barski
Tajinder Gadh
Geophysical Journal International (2025), ggae436
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This paper presents a novel approach for estimating the ground shaking intensity using real-time social media data and CCTV footage. Employing the Gemini 1.5 Pro’s (Reid et al. 2024) model, a multi-modal language model, we demonstrate the ability to extract relevant information from unstructured data utilizing generative AI and natural language processing. The model’s output, in the form of Modified Mercalli Intensity (MMI) values, align well with independent observational data. Furthermore, our results suggest that beyond its advanced visual and auditory understanding abilities, Gemini appears to utilize additional sources of knowledge, including a simplified understanding of the general relationship between earthquake magnitude, distance, and MMI intensity, which it presumably acquired during its training, in its reasoning and decision-making processes. These findings raise intriguing questions about the extent of Gemini's general understanding of the physical world and its phenomena. Gemini’s ability to generate results consistent with established scientific knowledge highlights the potential of LLMs like Gemini in augmenting our understanding of complex physical phenomena such as earthquakes. More specifically, the results of this study highlight the potential of LLMs like Gemini to revolutionize citizen seismology by enabling rapid, effective, and flexible analysis of crowdsourced data from eyewitness accounts for assessing earthquake impact and providing crisis situational awareness. This approach holds a great promise for improving early warning systems, disaster response, and overall resilience in earthquake-prone regions. This study provides a significant step toward harnessing the power of social media and AI for earthquake disaster mitigation.
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H2E: Hand, Head, Eye: A Multimodal Cascade of Natural Inputs
Ken Pfeuffer
Hans Gellersen
Khushman Patel
IEEE VR (2025)
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Eye-based interaction techniques for extended reality, such as gaze and pinch, are simple to use however suffer from input precision issues. We present H2E, a fine and coarse-grained pointing technique that cascades Hand, Head, and Eye inputs. As users initiate a pinch gesture, a cursor appears at the gaze point that can be dragged by head pointing before pinch confirmation. This has the potential advantage that it can add a precision component without changing the semantics of the technique. In this paper, we describe the design and implementation of the technique. Furthermore, we present an evaluation of our method in a Fitts-based user study, exploring the speed-accuracy trade-offs against a gaze and pinch interaction baseline.
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Avoid global outages by partitioning cloud applications to reduce blast radius
https://cloud.google.com/ (2025)
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Cloud application development faces the inherent challenge of balancing rapid innovation with high availability. This blog post details how Google Workspace's Site Reliability Engineering team addresses this conflict by implementing vertical partitioning of serving stacks. By isolating application servers and storage into distinct partitions, the "blast radius" of code changes and updates is significantly reduced, minimizing the risk of global outages. This approach, which complements canary deployments, enhances service availability, provides flexibility for experimentation, and facilitates data localization. While challenges such as data model complexities and inter-service partition misalignment exist, the benefits of improved reliability and controlled deployments make partitioning a crucial strategy for maintaining robust cloud applications
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Linear Elastic Caching via Ski Rental
Todd Lipcon
The biennial Conference on Innovative Data Systems Research (2025)
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In this work we study the Linear Elastic Caching problem, where the goal is to minimize the total cost of a cache inclusive of not just its misses, but also its memory footprint integrated over time. We demonstrate a theoretical connection to the classic ski rental problem and propose a practical algorithm that combines online caching algorithms with ski rental policies. We also introduce a lightweight machine learning-based algorithm for ski rental that is optimized for production workloads and is easy to integrate within existing database systems. Evaluations on both production workloads in Google Spanner and publicly available traces show that the proposed elastic caching approach can significantly reduce the total cache cost compared to traditional fixed-size cache policies.
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Circadian rhythm of heart rate and activity: a cross-sectional study
Maryam Khalid
Logan Schneider
Aravind Natarajan
Conor Heneghan
Karla Gleichauf
Chronobiology International (2025)
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ABSTRACT
Background: Circadian rhythms are commonly observed in a number of physiological processes. Consumer wearable devices have made it possible to obtain continuous time series data from a large number of individuals. We study circadian rhythms from measurements of heart rate, movement, and sleep, from a cohort of nearly 20,000 participants over the course of 30 days.
Methods: Participation was restricted to Fitbit users of age 21 years or older residing in the United States or Canada. Participants were enrolled through a recruitment banner shown on the Fitbit App. The advertisement was shown to 531,359 Fitbit users, and 23,239 enrolled in the program. Of these, we obtained heart rate data from 19,350 participants. We obtain the underlying circadian rhythm from time series heart rate by modeling the circadian rhythm as a sum over the first two Fourier harmonics. The first Fourier harmonic accounts for the 24-hour rhythmicity, while the second harmonic accounts for non-sinusoidal perturbations.
Findings: We observe a circadian rhythm in both heart rate and acceleration. From the diurnal modulation, we obtain the following circadian parameters: (i) amplitude of modulation, (ii) bathyphase, (iii) acrophase, (iv) non-sinusoidal fraction, and (v) fraction of day when the heart rate is greater than the mean. The amplitude, bathyphase, and acrophase depend on sex, and decrease with age. The waketime on average, follows the bathyphase by 2.4 hours. In most individuals, the circadian rhythm of heart rate lags the circadian rhythm of activity.
Interpretation: Circadian metrics for heart rate and activity can be reliably obtained from commercially available wearable devices. Distributions of circadian metrics can be valuable tools for individual-level interpretation.
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Augmenting LLMs with context leads to improved performance across many applications. Despite much research on Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) systems, an open question is whether errors arise because LLMs fail to utilize the context from retrieval or the context itself is insufficient to answer the query. To shed light on this, we develop a new notion of sufficient context, along with a way to classify instances that have enough information to answer the query. We then use sufficient context to analyze several models and datasets. By stratifying errors based on context sufficiency, we find that proprietary LLMs (Gemini, GPT, Claude) excel at answering queries when the context is sufficient, but often output incorrect answers instead of abstaining when the context is not. On the other hand, open-source LLMs (Llama, Mistral, Gemma) hallucinate or abstain often, even with sufficient context. We further categorize cases when the context is useful, and improves accuracy, even though it does not fully answer the query and the model errs without the context. Building on our findings, we explore ways to reduce hallucinations in RAG systems, including a new selective generation method that leverages sufficient context information for guided abstention. Our method improves the fraction of correct answers among times where the model responds by 2--10% for Gemini, GPT, and Gemma.
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We study the existence of almost fair and near-optimal solutions to a routing problem as defined in the seminal work of Rosenthal. We focus on the setting where multiple alternative routes are available for each potential request (which corresponds to a potential user of the network). This model captures a collection of diverse applications such as packet routing in communication networks, routing in road networks with multiple alternative routes, and the economics of transportation of goods.
Our recommended routes have provable guarantees in terms of both the total cost and fairness concepts such as approximate envy-freeness. We employ and appropriately combine tools from algorithmic game theory and fair division. Our results apply on two distinct models: the splittable case where the request is split among the selected paths (e.g., routing a fleet of trucks) and the unsplittable case where the request is assigned to one of its designated paths (e.g., a single user request). Finally, we conduct an empirical analysis to test the performance of our approach against simpler baselines using the real world road network of New York City.
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AI as a Catalyst for Educational Equity: Addressing Global Teacher Shortages and Learning Disparities
International Journal of Scientific Research in Computer Science, Engineering and Information Technology (IJSRCERT) (2025)
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The global education system is grappling with a critical shortage of teachers, threatening the achievement of universal quality education. This article examines how artificial intelligence (AI) technologies can revolutionize educational access and equity by addressing these systemic challenges. Through a comprehensive article analysis of AI-enabled solutions, including personalized learning mechanisms, virtual tutoring systems, and intelligent content distribution platforms, the article explores the transformative potential of these technologies in democratizing education. The article investigates the implementation of AI across established educational platforms, examining their effectiveness in providing adaptive learning experiences, breaking down language barriers, and ensuring cultural relevance. The article demonstrates that strategic AI integration can significantly impact learning outcomes while helping to bridge the global teacher shortage gap. The article also addresses critical implementation challenges, providing policy recommendations and resource allocation frameworks for successful AI adoption in education systems worldwide. This article analysis contributes to the growing body of knowledge on educational technology by offering practical insights into how AI can be leveraged to create more inclusive, effective, and accessible learning environments, ultimately advancing the goal of quality education for all.
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Differentiable Approximations for Distance Queries
David M. Mount
Proceedings of the 2025 Annual ACM-SIAM Symposium on Discrete Algorithms (SODA)
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The widespread use of gradient-based optimization has motivated the adaptation of various classical algorithms into differentiable solvers compatible with learning pipelines. In this paper, we investigate the enhancement of traditional geometric query problems such that the result consists of both the geometric function as well as its gradient. Specifically, we study the fundamental problem of distance queries against a set of points P in R^d, which also underlies various similarity measures for learning algorithms.
The main result of this paper is a multiplicative (1+epsilon)-approximation of the Euclidean distance to P which is differentiable at all points in R^d \ P with asymptotically optimal bounds on the norms of its gradient and Hessian, from a data structure with storage and query time matching state-of-the-art results for approximate nearest-neighbor searching. The approximation is realized as a regularized distance through a partition-of-unity framework, which efficiently blends multiple local approximations, over a suitably defined covering of space, into a smooth global approximation. In order to obtain the local distance approximations in a manner that facilitates blending, we develop a new approximate Voronoi diagram based on a simple point-location data structure, simplifying away both the lifting transformation and ray shooting.
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Beyond Touchscreens: Designing for Co-Occurring Accessibility Needs
Melissa Barnhart Wantland
Mai Kobori
Universal Access in Human-Computer Interaction, Springer-Verlag (2025) (to appear)
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Today’s smartphone interactions are typically designed with one primary preset, accompanied by customization settings that can be manually adjusted. To promote the creation of contextually aware experiences, researchers have highlighted the factors that influence mobile device usage in the ability-based design framework. This paper expands upon existing frameworks and contributes to an empirical understanding of smartphone accessibility. Through a 10-day longitudinal diary study and video interview with 24 individuals who do and do not identify as having a disability, the research also illustrates the reactions of reattempt, adaptation, and avoidance, which were used in response to a lack of smartphone accessibility. Despite experiencing scenarios where accessibility settings could be leveraged, 20 out of 24 participants did not use accessibility settings on their smartphone. A total of 12 out of 24 participants tried accessibility settings on their smartphones, however identifying accessibility was not for them. This work highlights the need to shift current design practices to better serve the accessibility community.
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PreFix: Optimizing the Performance of Heap-Intensive Applications
Chaitanya Mamatha Ananda
Rajiv Gupta
Han Shen
CGO 2025: International Symposium on Code Generation and Optimization, Las Vegas, NV, USA (to appear)
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Analyses of heap-intensive applications show that a small fraction of heap objects account for the majority of heap accesses and data cache misses. Prior works like HDS and HALO have shown that allocating hot objects in separate memory regions can improve spatial locality leading to better application performance. However, these techniques are constrained in two primary ways, limiting their gains. First, these techniques have Imperfect Separation, polluting the hot memory region with several cold objects. Second, reordering of objects across allocations is not possible as the original object allocation order is preserved. This paper presents a novel technique that achieves near perfect separation of hot objects via a new context mechanism that efficiently identifies hot objects with high precision. This technique, named PreFix, is based upon Preallocating memory for a Fixed small number of hot objects. The program, guided by profiles, is instrumented to compute context information derived from
dynamic object identifiers, that precisely identifies hot object allocations that are then placed at predetermined locations in the preallocated memory. The preallocated memory region for hot objects provides the flexibility to reorder objects across allocations and allows colocation of objects that are part of a hot data stream (HDS), improving spatial locality. The runtime overhead of identifying hot objects is not significant as this optimization is only focused on a small number of static hot allocation sites and dynamic hot objects. While there is an increase in the program’s memory foot-print, it is manageable and can be controlled by limiting the size of the preallocated memory. In addition, PreFix incorporates an object recycling optimization that reuses the same preallocated space to store different objects whose lifetimes are not expected to overlap. Our experiments with 13 heap-intensive applications yields reductions in execution times ranging from 2.77% to 74%. On average PreFix reduces execution time by 21.7% compared to 7.3% by HDS and 14% by HALO. This is due to PreFix’s precision in hot object identification, hot object colocation, and low runtime overhead.
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Triaging mammography with artificial intelligence: an implementation study
Samantha Winter
Atilla Kiraly
Scott Mayer McKinney
Jie Yang
Krish Eswaran
Shravya Shetty
Timo Kohlberger
Stacey Caron
Fereshteh Mahvar
David Melnick
Sonya Bhole
Arnav Agharwal
David V. Schacht
Dipti Gupta
Basil Mustafa
Alejandra Maciel
Martha Sevenich
Sarah M. Friedewald
Mozziyar Etemadi
Sunny Jansen
Shiro Kadowaki
Gavin Duggan
Rubin Zhang
Luca Speroni
Breast Cancer Research and Treatment (2025)
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Purpose
Many breast centers are unable to provide immediate results at the time of screening mammography which results in delayed patient care. Implementing artificial intelligence (AI) could identify patients who may have breast cancer and accelerate the time to diagnostic imaging and biopsy diagnosis.
Methods
In this prospective randomized, unblinded, controlled implementation study we enrolled 1000 screening participants between March 2021 and May 2022. The experimental group used an AI system to prioritize a subset of cases for same-visit radiologist evaluation, and same-visit diagnostic workup if necessary. The control group followed the standard of care. The primary operational endpoints were time to additional imaging (TA) and time to biopsy diagnosis (TB).
Results
The final cohort included 463 experimental and 392 control participants. The one-sided Mann-Whitney U test was employed for analysis of TA and TB. In the control group, the TA was 25.6 days [95% CI 22.0–29.9] and TB was 55.9 days [95% CI 45.5–69.6]. In comparison, the experimental group's mean TA was reduced by 25% (6.4 fewer days [one-sided 95% CI > 0.3], p<0.001) and mean TB was reduced by 30% (16.8 fewer days; 95% CI > 5.1], p=0.003). The time reduction was more pronounced for AI-prioritized participants in the experimental group. All participants eventually diagnosed with breast cancer were prioritized by the AI.
Conclusions
Implementing AI prioritization can accelerate care timelines for patients requiring additional workup, while maintaining the efficiency of delayed interpretation for most participants. Reducing diagnostic delays could contribute to improved patient adherence, decreased anxiety and addressing disparities in access to timely care.
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Security Signals: Making Web Security Posture Measurable At Scale
Santiago (Sal) Díaz
David Dworken
Artur Janc
Workshop on Measurements, Attacks, and Defenses for the Web (MADWeb)
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The area of security measurability is gaining increased attention, with a wide range of organizations calling for the development of scalable approaches for assessing the security of software systems and infrastructure. In this paper, we present our experience developing Security Signals, a comprehensive system providing security measurability for web services, deployed in a complex application ecosystem of thousands of web services handling traffic from billions of users. The system collects security-relevant information from production HTTP traffic at the reverse proxy layer, utilizing novel concepts such as synthetic signals augmented with additional risk information to provide a holistic view of the security posture of individual services and the broader application ecosystem. This approach to measurability has enabled large-scale security improvements to our services, including prioritized rollouts of security enhancements and the implementation of automated regression monitoring. Furthermore, it has proven valuable for security research and prioritization of defensive work. Security Signals addresses shortcomings of prior web measurability proposals by tracking a comprehensive set of security properties relevant to web applications, and by extracting insights from collected data for use by both security experts and non-experts. We believe the lessons learned from the implementation and use of Security Signals offer valuable insights for practitioners responsible for web service security, potentially inspiring new approaches to web security measurability.
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