Mayur Datar

Google news personalization: scalable online collaborative filtering

Several approaches to collaborative filtering have been studied but seldom have studies been reported for large (several millionusers and items) and dynamic (the underlying item set is continually changing) settings. In this paper we describe our approach to collaborative filtering for generating personalized recommendations for users of Google News. We generate recommendations using three approaches: collaborative filtering using MinHash clustering, Probabilistic Latent Semantic Indexing (PLSI), and covisitation counts. We combine recommendations from different algorithms using a linear model. Our approach is content agnostic and consequently domain independent, making it easily adaptable for other applications and languages with minimal effort. This paper will describe our algorithms and system setup in detail, and report results of running the recommendations engine on Google News.

Load Shedding in Data Stream Systems

Systems for processing continuous monitoring queries over data streams must be adaptive because data streams are often bursty and data characteristics may vary over time. In this chapter, we focus on one particular type of adaptivity: the ability to gracefully degrade performance via “load shedding” (dropping unprocessed tuples to reduce system load) when the demands placed on the system cannot be met in full given available resources. Focusing on aggregation queries, we present algorithms that determine at what points in a query plan should load shedding be performed and what amount of load should be shed at each point in order to minimize the degree of inaccuracy introduced into query answers. We also discuss strategies for load shedding for other types of queries (set-valued queries, join queries, and classification queries).

The Sliding-Window Computation Model and Results

The sliding-window model of computation is motivated by the assumption that, in certain data-stream processing applications, recent data is more useful and pertinent than older data. In such cases, we would like to answer questions about the data only over the last N most recent data elements (N is a parameter). We formalize this model of computation and answer questions about how much space and computation time is required to solve certain problems under the sliding-window model.