Marcos Antonio Vaz Salles

Associate Professor
Coleader of the Data Management Systems (DMS) Group
Software, Data, People & Society (SDPS) Section
Department of Computer Science (DIKU)
University of Copenhagen

Universitetsparken 5
DK-2100 Copenhagen
Denmark

Office location: Sigurdsgade 41, 2.10
Email: vmarcos [at] di [dot] ku [dot] dk
Voice: +45 2383 9958

Description: Description: Description: Description: Description: marcos_vaz_salles


I am transitioning from academia to industry. As of end of April/2022, this website will no longer be updated. Please refer to my LinkedIn profile for further information.

My research targets building declarative and efficient data-centric systems for emerging interactive applications, bringing together techniques from software engineering and data management. My recent work has been focused on distributed in-memory data management as well as search over and monitoring of spatial datasets. In particular, I am exploring the new abstraction of actor database systems and its relationship to online IoT data platforms as well as collaborating on projects in microservices and AI for open geodata management. In terms of approach, I am a systems-oriented, experimental computer scientist. In other words, I love to build novel systems and use experiments to validate their properties. My joint work on latency optimization for the cloud with collaborators from Cornell University has been distinguished in a special issue on the best papers of VLDB 2013. My former student Vivek Shah has been awarded the best paper runner up award at the VLDB 2014 PhD Workshop for his vision for transactional partitioning, a precursor to our exploration of actor-oriented databases.

My teaching comprises courses at the MSc and BSc level, in both data management and computer systems, as well as mentoring activities for BSc, MSc, and PhD students. I have been influenced by an active, student-centered perspective in teaching and by the notion of constructive alignment. I have been honored with the DIKU Teacher of the Year 2012 award, and was a member of the committee on the revision of DIKU's BSc program in computer science. The latter was distinguished with a special DIKU Recognition Award in 2014.

My service includes having acted as general co-chair for EDBT/ICDT 2020, finance chair for VLDB 2021, Core PC member for ACM SIGMOD 2019, and PC or editorial board member for several scientific conferences and journals in data management. My reviewing work has been recognized with a Distinguished Reviewer award at VLDB 2021.


You may find more information on current and past projects of our research group on the page of Data Management Systems @ DIKU.

My research is at present primarily funded by the awards: A Decentralized Data Management Platform for Complex Transactions (university-side PI for IFD Industrial PhD with Deon Digital), PAPRiCaS: Programming technology foundations for Accountability, Privacy-by-design & Robustness in Context-aware Systems (work package leader in DFF project), Data Science for Weather and Climate Science (PI in International Network Programme grant), Geospatial Processing of IoT Data Streams in Digital Agriculture: The Case for Actor-Oriented Database Systems (PI for UCPH-FAPESP SPRINT collaboration), Digital contracts for smarter business and security on a global scale (university-side project leader in IFD InnoBooster with Deon Digital), and Monitoring Changes in Big Satellite Data via Massively-Parallel Artificial Intelligence (co-PI for DFF project).


 

Recent and Selected Publications


·      Yijian Liu, Li Su, Vivek Shah, Yongluan Zhou, Marcos Antonio Vaz Salles.

Hybrid Deterministic and Nondeterministic Execution of Transactions in Actor Systems.

ACM SIGMOD 2022, Philadelphia, USA.

·      Rodrigo Laigner, Yongluan Zhou, Marcos Antonio Vaz Salles, Yijian Liu, Marcos Kalinowski.

Data Management in Microservices: State of the Practice, Challenges, and Research Directions.

PVLDB 14(13): 3348-3361 (2021) / VLDB 2022, Sydney, Australia.

[ArXiv PDF]

·      Rodrigo Laigner, Yongluan Zhou, Marcos Antonio Vaz Salles.

A distributed database system for event-based microservices.

DEBS 2021 Online.

·      Angela Bonifati, Giovanni Guerrini, Carsten Lutz, Wim Martens, Lara Mazilu, Norman Paton, Marcos Antonio Vaz Salles, Marc Scholl, Yongluan Zhou.

Holding a Conference Online and Live due to COVID-19.

SIGMOD Record 49(4): 28-32, 2020.

[Blog@CACM version] [ArXiv PDF].

·      Stefan Oehmcke, Christoffer Thrysøe, Andreas Borgstad, Marcos Antonio Vaz Salles, Martin Brandt, Fabian Gieseke.

Detecting Hardly Visible Roads in Low-Resolution Satellite Time Series Data.

IEEE BigData 2019, Los Angeles, USA.

·      Yiwen Wang, Julio Cesar Dos Reis, Kasper Myrtue Borggren, Marcos Antonio Vaz Salles, Claudia Bauzer Medeiros, Yongluan Zhou.

Modeling and Building IoT Data Platforms with Actor-Oriented Databases.

EDBT 2019, Lisbon, Portugal.

·      Vivek Shah, Marcos Antonio Vaz Salles.

Reactors: A Case for Predictable, Virtualized Actor Database Systems.

ACM SIGMOD 2018, Houston, USA.

[Extended Version] [Slides by Vivek Shah] [Conference Presentation Video]

·      Tao Zou, Ronan Le Bras, Marcos Antonio Vaz Salles, Alan Demers, Johannes Gehrke.

ClouDiA: A Deployment Advisor for Public Clouds.

The VLDB Journal 24(5): 633-653 (2015). Special Issue on the Best Papers of VLDB 2013.

[Slides by Tao Zou] [Conference Version] PVLDB 6(2): 109-120 (2012) / VLDB 2013, Riva del Garda, Italy.

·      Pimin Konstantin Kefaloukos, Marcos Antonio Vaz Salles, Martin Zachariasen.

Declarative Cartography: In-Database Map Generalization of Geospatial Datasets.

ICDE 2014, Chicago, USA.

·      Benjamin Sowell, Marcos Antonio Vaz Salles, Tuan Cao, Alan Demers, Johannes Gehrke.

An Experimental Analysis of Iterated Spatial Joins in Main Memory.

PVLDB 6(14): 1882-1893 (2013) / VLDB 2014, Hangzhou, China.

·      Tuan Cao, Marcos Antonio Vaz Salles, Benjamin Sowell, Yao Yue, Alan Demers, Johannes Gehrke, Walker White.

Fast Checkpoint Recovery Algorithms for Frequently Consistent Applications.

ACM SIGMOD 2011, Athens, Greece.

[Slides] At the conference, we also presented a demo on our recovery library.

·      Jens Dittrich, Lukas Blunschi, Marcos Antonio Vaz Salles.

MOVIES: Indexing Moving Objects by Shooting Index Images.

GeoInformatica 15(4): 727-767 (2011). Special Issue on the Best Papers of SSTD 2009.

[Conference Version] SSTD 2009, Aalborg, Denmark.

·      Guozhang Wang, Marcos Antonio Vaz Salles, Benjamin Sowell, Xun Wang, Tuan Cao, Alan Demers, Johannes Gehrke, Walker White.

Behavioral Simulations in MapReduce.

PVLDB 3(1): 952-963 (2010) / VLDB 2010, Singapore.

[Slides by Guozhang Wang]

·      Marcos Antonio Vaz Salles, Tuan Cao, Benjamin Sowell, Alan Demers, Johannes Gehrke, Christoph Koch, Walker White.

An Evaluation of Checkpoint Recovery for Massively Multiplayer Online Games.

PVLDB 2(1): 1258-1269 (2009) / VLDB 2009, Lyon, France.

[Slides by Tuan Cao]

·      Marcos Antonio Vaz Salles, Jens-Peter Dittrich, Shant Kirakos Karakashian, Olivier René Girard, Lukas Blunschi.

iTrails: Pay-as-you-go Information Integration in Dataspaces.

VLDB 2007, Vienna, Austria.

[Slides] [Video]

·      Jens-Peter Dittrich, Marcos Antonio Vaz Salles.

iDM: A Unified and Versatile Data Model for Personal Dataspace Management.

VLDB 2006, Seoul, South Korea.

 

 

Teaching and Mentoring

 

·      At DIKU, I am teaching our undergraduate course Development of Information Systems (since Feb/17-Jun/17) over blocks 3 and 4. In the past, I have taught Advanced Computer Systems (formerly Principles of Computer System Design) at the master's level (Nov/18-Jan/19, since Nov/11-Jan/12), as well as Reactive and Event-Based Systems (Nov/19-Jan/20), Data Science (Feb/19-Jun/19, Feb/20-Jun/20), Databases and Web Programming / Data Mining (Feb/15-Apr/15, Feb/14-Apr/14) and Computer Networks (Apr/13-Jun/13, Apr/12-Jun/12) at the undergraduate level.

·      During Fall 2010, I taught Introduction to Database Systems (CS4320/1) at Cornell University. Previously, I have been a teaching assistant for the database implementation and data warehousing courses at ETH Zurich. I have also taught extension courses in database tuning while back home in Brazil.

·      I am mentoring the following people at DIKU:

o   Tobias Hallundbæk Petersen, Industrial PhD student.

o   Rodrigo Laigner, PhD student: as co-supervisor, primary supervisor: Yongluan Zhou.

o   Dmitry Seryhk, PhD student: as co-supervisor, primary supervisor: Cosmin Oancea.

·      In the past, I advised the following PhD students and postdocs at DIKU:

o   Yiwen Wang, PhD student. First employment: Danske Bank, Denmark

o   Vivek Shah, PhD student and postdoc. First employment: Deon Digital, Denmark

o   Kristoffer Stensbo-Smidt, postdoc co-mentored with Christian Igel. First employment: Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow at University of Cambridge, UK.

o   Pimin Konstantin (Kostas) Kefaloukos, industrial PhD student, co-advised with Martin Zachariasen. First employment: AudienceProject, Denmark.

·      I have also advised 21 MSc thesis, five MSc project, and six BSc project/company project students at DIKU. In addition, I have co-advised five MSc thesis students and three BSc short project students.

·      While at Cornell, I have helped Johannes Gehrke advise a group of talented PhD students working on data management for games and simulations. While at ETH Zurich, I have co-advised six MSc theses and 10 BSc projects.

·      An acknowledgement is here due to my mentors: Johannes Gehrke (now at Microsoft) at Cornell University (postdoc), Jens Dittrich (now at Saarland University) and Donald Kossmann (now at Microsoft) at ETH Zurich (PhD), Sérgio Lifschitz at PUC-Rio (MSc), and Claudia Bauzer Medeiros at the University of Campinas (BSc).

 

 

Recent Service

 

·      Conference Organization

o   Finance chair of VLDB 2021, August 16-20, 2021, Copenhagen, Denmark.

o   General co-chair of EDBT/ICDT 2020 Joint Conference, March 29 - April 2, 2020, Copenhagen, Denmark.

o   Co-organizer of Workshop on Big Graph Analysis Systems @ DIKU, held 21-22 August 2017.

o   Advisory committee member for OBD 2014-2016.

o   Proceedings co-chair for ICDE 2012.

·      PC Member

o   VLDB 2021 / PVLDB vol. 14

o   ICDE 2021

o   IEEE BigData 2019

o   VLDB 2019 Demo Track

o   SSTD 2019 Demo Track

o   ACM SIGMOD 2019 Core PC

o   ICDE 2018 Industry and Applications Track

o   SSTD 2017 Demo Track

o   DSAA 2016 Applications Track

o   VLDB 2016 PhD Workshop

o   SSTD 2015 Demo Track

o   MobiWis 2015

o   ACM SIGMOD 2015

o   EDBT 2015

o   IEEE eScience 2014

o   SBBD 2014 / JIDM vol. 5

o   VLDB 2014 / PVLDB vol. 7

o   SSDBM 2013

o   MobiDE 2013

o   ICDE 2013

o   DanaC 2012

o   ACM SIGMOD 2012 Demo Track

o   ICDE 2012

·      Reviewer for VLDB Journal, ACM TODS, ACM SIGMOD Record, Journal of Information and Data Management, Information Systems, TKDE, SNAM, and GeoInformatica.

·      Keynote speaker at 2017 Nordic Plant Phenotyping Network Workshop, invited talk at Data Management Day @ University of Cyprus (in memoriam George Samaras), distinguished published paper talks at SBBD 2019 and SBBD 2020.

·      Department Service at DIKU

o   MSc Teaching Coordination Team: Organizer (concluded).

o   Department Council for Strategic Advising: Member (concluded).

o   DIKU Communication Board: Member (concluded).

o   CS BSc Curriculum Revision: Committee Member (concluded).

o   CS MSc Profile Revision: Committee Member (concluded).

o   Danish Bibliometric Evaluation: Section Representative (concluded).

o   CS BSc International Best Practices: Committee Member (concluded).

 

Additional Information

 

[DBLP | Google Scholar | Extended Publication List | ResearchGate | LinkedIn]