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Mobility, power, and price points often dictate that robots do not have sufficient computing power on board to run contemporary robot algorithms at desired rates. Cloud computing providers such as AWS, GCP, and Azure offer immense computing power on demand, but tapping into that power from a robot is non-trivial. We present FogROS2, an open-source platform to facilitate cloud and fog robotics that is compatible with the emerging Robot Operating System 2 (ROS 2) standard. FogROS2 is completely redesigned and distinct from its predecessor FogROS1 in 9 ways, and has lower latency, overhead, and startup times; improved usability, and additional automa-tion, such as region and computer type selection. Additionally, FogROS2 was added to the official distribution of ROS 2, gaining performance, timing, and additional improvements associated with ROS 2. In examples, FogROS2 reduces SLAM latency by 50 %, reduces grasp planning time from 14 s to 1.2 s, and speeds up motion planning 28x. When compared to FogROS1, FogROS2 reduces network utilization by up to 3.8x, improves startup time by 63 %, and network round-trip latency by 97 %for images using video compression. The source code, examples, and documentation for FogROS2 are available at https://github.com/BerkeleyAutomation/FogROS2, and is available through the official ROS 2 repository at https://index.ros.org/p/fogros2/ 

Digibox is a prototyping environment for IoT applications. It enables a novel scene-centric prototyping where developers can program an ensemble of simulated devices to capture not only their individual but also their coordinated behaviors, making it possible to test, debug, and evaluate the behaviors of an IoT application. Using Digibox, developers can download and reuse existing scenes, customize, and repurpose them towards developing new applications; or replicate others' experiment results from scientific research. Digibox's Kubernetes-based runtime further allows developers to easily scale the prototyping environment from a single laptop to a cluster running simulated devices and scenes at a scale appropriate to the application. 

As distributed applications become increasingly complex, so do their scheduling requirements. This development calls for cluster schedulers that are not only general, but also evolvable. Unfortunately, most existing cluster schedulers are not evolvable: when confronted with new requirements, they need major rewrites to support these requirements. Examples include gang-scheduling support in Kubernetes [6, 39] or task-affinity in Spark [39]. Some cluster schedulers [14, 30] expose physical resources to applications to address this. While these approaches are evolvable, they push the burden of implementing scheduling mechanisms in addition to the policies entirely to the application. ESCHER is a cluster scheduler design that achieves both evolvability and application-level simplicity. ESCHER uses an abstraction exposed by several recent frameworks (which we call ephemeral resources) that lets the application express scheduling constraints as resource requirements. These requirements are then satisfied by a simple mechanism matching resource demands to available resources. We implement ESCHER on Kubernetes and Ray, and show that this abstraction can be used to express common policies offered by monolithic schedulers while allowing applications to easily create new custom policies hitherto unsupported. 

Applications today rely on cloud databases for storing and querying time-series data. While outsourcing storage is convenient, this data is often sensitive, making data breaches a serious concern. We present Waldo, a time-series database with rich functionality and strong security guarantees: Waldo supports multi-predicate filtering, protects data contents as well as query filter values and search access patterns, and provides malicious security in the 3-party honest-majority setting. In contrast, prior systems such as Timecrypt and Zeph have limited functionality and security: (1) these systems can only filter on time, and (2) they reveal the queried time interval to the server. Oblivious RAM (ORAM) and generic multiparty computation (MPC) are natural choices for eliminating leakage from prior work, but both of these are prohibitively expensive in our setting due to the number of roundtrips and bandwidth overhead, respectively. To minimize both, Waldo builds on top of function secret sharing, enabling Waldo to evaluate predicates non-interactively. We develop new techniques for applying function secret sharing to the encrypted database setting where there are malicious servers, secret inputs, and chained predicates. With 32-core machines, Waldo runs a query with 8 range predicates over 2 18 records in 3.03s, compared to 12.88s or an MPC baseline and 16.56s for an ORAM baseline. Compared to Waldo, the MPC baseline uses 9−82× more bandwidth between servers (for different numbers of records), while the ORAM baseline uses 20−152× more bandwidth between the client and server(s) (for different numbers of predicates). 

Query optimizers are a performance-critical component in every database system. Due to their complexity, optimizers take experts months to write and years to refine. In this work, we demonstrate for the first time that learning to optimize queries without learning from an expert optimizer is both possible and efficient. We present Balsa, a query optimizer built by deep reinforcement learning. Balsa first learns basic knowledge from a simple, environment-agnostic simulator, followed by safe learning in real execution. On the Join Order Benchmark, Balsa matches the performance of two expert query optimizers, both open-source and commercial, with two hours of learning, and outperforms them by up to 2.8× in workload runtime after a few more hours. Balsa thus opens the possibility of automatically learning to optimize in future compute environments where expert-designed optimizers do not exist. 

Autonomous vehicles (AVs) must drive across a variety of challenging environments that impose continuously-varying deadlines and runtime-accuracy tradeoffs on their software pipelines. A deadline-driven execution of such AV pipelines requires a new class of systems that enable the computation to maximize accuracy under dynamically-varying deadlines. Designing these systems presents interesting challenges that arise from combining ease-of-development of AV pipelines with deadline specification and enforcement mechanisms. Our work addresses these challenges through D3 (Dynamic Deadline-Driven), a novel execution model that centralizes the deadline management, and allows applications to adjust their computation by modeling missed deadlines as exceptions. Further, we design and implement ERDOS, an open-source realization of D3 for AV pipelines that exposes finegrained execution events to applications, and provides mechanisms to speculatively execute computation and enforce deadlines between an arbitrary set of events. Finally, we address the crucial lack of AV benchmarks through our state-of-the-art open-source AV pipeline, Pylot, that works seamlessly across simulators and real AVs. We evaluate the efficacy of D3 and ERDOS by driving Pylot across challenging driving scenarios spanning 50km, and observe a 68% reduction in collisions as compared to prior execution models. 

The HTTP adaptive streaming technique opened the door to cope with the fluctuating network conditions during the streaming process by dynamically adjusting the volume of the future chunks to be downloaded. The bitrate selection in this adjustment inevitably involves the task of predicting the future throughput of a video session, owing to which various heuristic solutions have been explored. The ultimate goal of the present work is to explore the theoretical upper bounds of the QoE that any ABR algorithm can possibly reach, therefore providing an essential step to benchmarking the performance evaluation of ABR algorithms. In our setting, the QoE is defined in terms of a linear combination of the average perceptual quality and the buffering ratio. The optimization problem is proven to be NP-hard when the perceptual quality is defined by chunk size and conditions are given under which the problem becomes polynomially solvable. Enriched by a global lower bound, a pseudo-polynomial time algorithm along the dynamic programming approach is presented. When the minimum buffering is given higher priority over higher perceptual quality, the problem is shown to be also NP-hard, and the above algorithm is simplified and enhanced by a sequence of lower bounds on the completion time of chunk downloading, which, according to our experiment, brings a 36.0% performance improvement in terms of computation time. To handle large amounts of data more efficiently, a polynomial-time algorithm is also introduced to approximate the optimal values when minimum buffering is prioritized. Besides its performance guarantee, this algorithm is shown to reach 99.938% close to the optimal results, while taking only 0.024% of the computation time compared to the exact algorithm in dynamic programming. 

While input-output examples are a natural form of specification for program synthesis engines, they can be imprecise for domains such as table transformations. In this paper, we investigate how extracting readily-available information about the user intent behind these input-output examples helps speed up synthesis and reduce overfitting. We present Gauss, a synthesis algorithm for table transformations that accepts partial input-output examples, along with user intent graphs. Gauss includes a novel conflict-resolution reasoning algorithm over graphs that enables it to learn from mistakes made during the search and use that knowledge to explore the space of programs even faster. It also ensures the final program is consistent with the user intent specification, reducing overfitting. We implement Gauss for the domain of table transformations (supporting Pandas and R), and compare it to three state-of-the-art synthesizers accepting only input-output examples. We find that it is able to reduce the search space by 56×, 73× and 664× on average, resulting in 7×, 26× and 7× speedups in synthesis times on average, respectively.