Sam Madden

Professor, MIT EECS and Chief Scientist, Cambridge Mobile Telematics

[Sam Madden @samrmadden]

Cool new work from my student Joshua.

[Joshua Gu @astrogu_]

Recent agentic systems (Claude Code, Codex, RLM, etc.) push context out of the prompt and into the environment (e.g., as files). This helps them maintain long-term knowledge about their goals and functionality.

🚨 While this is a good idea, we show a surprising result: systems that use external environments like this perform much better when given a small, fixed-size, in-context, agent-managed cache that "𝘱𝘦𝘦𝘬𝘴 𝘪𝘯𝘵𝘰" these environments.

🚀 Our paper, 𝗣𝗘𝗘𝗞: 𝙖 𝙨𝙮𝙨𝙩𝙚𝙢 𝙛𝙤𝙧 𝙗𝙪𝙞𝙡𝙙𝙞𝙣𝙜 𝙖𝙣𝙙 𝙢𝙖𝙞𝙣𝙩𝙖𝙞𝙣𝙞𝙣𝙜 𝗮𝗻 𝗼𝗿𝗶𝗲𝗻𝘁𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗰𝗮𝗰𝗵𝗲 𝙛𝙤𝙧 𝙇𝙇𝙈 𝙖𝙜𝙚𝙣𝙩𝙨, introduces this idea.

Compared with strong baselines, including RAG, Compaction Agents, and SOTA prompt-learning frameworks, PEEK dominates the cost–quality Pareto frontier: achieving +6.3–34.0% in quality, with fewer iterations and lower cost.

Paper: https://t.co/67pm4Dqbw5
GitHub: https://t.co/JNMehuzN9M

More in the thread below! (1/N)

[Nesime Tatbul @tatbul]

📢 CfP: Conference on Innovative Data Systems Research #CIDR2027 (Amsterdam, The Netherlands). Papers due: August 4, 2026. @ViktorLeis, @samrmadden, and I are looking forward to your paper & demo submissions! https://t.co/Vf4TDqWqJO

[Sam Madden @samrmadden]

Interesting article about #SemBench, a new benchmark for semantic AI operators; our Palimpsest system does super well on it!

[Matthew Russo @RussoMatthew]

📣 We're spreading the word about #SemBench -- a brand new benchmark for semantic query processing over multimodal workloads including text, image, audio, and tabular data!

📜Paper: https://t.co/Vai6Z3aRQK
💻Website: https://t.co/yAPaQwhagF
💾Code: https://t.co/nSBE9vEXbC

[Sam Madden @samrmadden]

Start thinking about your CIDR submissions now!

[Nesime Tatbul @tatbul]

📢 CfP: Conference on Innovative Data Systems Research #CIDR2026 (Chaminade, USA). Papers due: August 5, 2025. Gustavo Alonso, @samrmadden, and I are looking forward to your paper & demo submissions! https://t.co/oOB4kPp3R3

[MIT School of Engineering @MITEngineering]

Henry Corrigan-Gibbs, a professor in @MITEECS, has been named a recipient of the 2024 Junior Bose Award.

[Hari Balakrishnan @HariBalakrish20]

https://t.co/Yq0fuO8M0Z

[Sam Madden @samrmadden]

Last chance to register for CIDR 2025 in Amsterdam!

[CIDR 2026 @cidrdb]

The CIDR 2025 program is online: https://t.co/i3yNPwXxGb

Registration closes today -- Join us in Amsterdam:
https://t.co/8ofnySQznz

[Sam Madden @samrmadden]

@sirrice @sigmod @VLDBconf Just go build stuff you think is cool, and publish about it in the venue you think is the best fit. Our community will be fine; we will find fascinating ways to build new AI powered data systems!

[Sam Madden @samrmadden]

@sirrice @sigmod @VLDBconf Thanks for this post, @sirrice . As I’m sure I’ve said to you, I’m not a huge fan of “navel gazing”. We had these same conversations in 2000, 2010, etc — and we found ways to contribute to the Internet, Big Data, Cloud, …

[Sam Madden @samrmadden]

@cbinnig @NeurIPSConf Congrats!

[Sam Madden @samrmadden]

@pvldb Our unofficial logo:

[PVLDB @pvldb]

Vol:17 No:12 → Databases Unbound: Querying All of the World’s Bytes with AI https://t.co/ij1GtrQ15U

[Sam Madden @samrmadden]

@joe_hellerstein @overleaf Did I miss some announcement? It looks like UCB pays for a site license? For those asking, I find for multi-author papers supporting concurrent editing is significantly better than git-based versioning. I do agree that it is worrying that papers are now archived on Overleaf.

[Andy Pavlo (@andypavlo.bsky.social) @andy_pavlo]

It took three years to finish, but our follow-up to the 2006 "What Goes Around Comes Around" is finally out! Stonebraker and I examine the last 20 years in databases and discuss why relational databases + SQL will continue to remain on top.

📄PDF: https://t.co/ZwTWSxXLWb

[Disseminate: The Computer Science Research Podcast @DisseminatePod]

🚨 NEW EPISODE: High Impact in Databases with... Joe Hellerstein (@joe_hellerstein) is available now!

🎧 Listen on Apple ➡️ https://t.co/02zfDQ6O5Y

🎧 Listen on Spotify ➡️ https://t.co/PgTrDblzJx

☕️ Support the podcast ➡️ https://t.co/tVHEIk5EgN

[Nesime Tatbul @tatbul]

Sam Madden: ”The world is the database” @samrmadden @SIGMODConf #SIGMOD2024 🎉

[Sam Madden @samrmadden]

@amolumd Basically just going to further flood my feed with Internet shills instead of content from the people I actually want to hear from....

[Sam Madden @samrmadden]

@cbinnig @SIGMODConf @tuda_systems Congrats!

[Sam Madden @samrmadden]

Excited to announce the release of our Palimpzest system and paper!

[Matthew Russo @RussoMatthew]

If this (very high-level) summary of our work has piqued your interest -- go read our full paper!

📄Paper: https://t.co/x7K4fmb2MX
💻Code: https://t.co/XwDp6K2mtM

We would love to hear any feedback, ideas for more use cases, and/or opportunities for collaboration.

[Sam Madden @samrmadden]

@manathan1984 @sigmod @SIGMODConf Thank you @manathan1984 and reviewers for taking on this very important service for the community.