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There is broad agreement that Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems, particularly those using Machine Learning (ML), should be able to "explain" their behavior. Unfortunately, there is little agreement as to what constitutes an…
Distributed databases, as the core infrastructure software for internet applications, play a critical role in modern cloud services. However, existing distributed databases frequently experience system failures and performance degradation,…
Data is central to the development and evaluation of machine learning (ML) models. However, the use of problematic or inappropriate datasets can result in harms when the resulting models are deployed. To encourage responsible AI practice…
The demanding requirements of the new Big Data intensive era raised the need for flexible storage systems capable of handling huge volumes of unstructured data and of tackling the challenges that traditional databases were facing. NoSQL…
Many techniques were proposed for detecting software misconfigurations in cloud systems and for diagnosing unintended behavior caused by such misconfigurations. Detection and diagnosis are steps in the right direction: misconfigurations…
We introduce an interleaving operational semantics for describing the client-observable behaviour of atomic transactions on distributed key-value stores. Our semantics builds on abstract states comprising centralised, global key-value…
Modern large language model (LLM) services increasingly rely on complex, often abstract operations, such as multi-step reasoning and multi-agent collaboration, to generate high-quality outputs. While users are billed based on token…
In general, Terms of Service (ToS) and other policy documents are verbose and full of legal jargon, which poses challenges for users to understand. To improve user accessibility and transparency, the "Terms of Service; Didn't Read" (ToS;DR)…
Cloud systems have become increasingly popular in recent years due to their flexibility and scalability. Each time cloud computing applications and services hosted on the cloud are affected by a cloud outage, users can experience slow…
With the spread of services related to cloud environment, it is tiresome and time consuming for users to look for the appropriate service that meet with their needs. Therefore, finding a valid and reliable service is essential. However, in…
Database system is an indispensable part of software projects. It plays an important role in data organization and storage. Its performance and efficiency are directly related to the performance of software. Nowadays, we have many general…
AI workloads incur frequent failures and incidents from the underlying infrastructure. The current incident management workflow follows a provider-centric paradigm, where users report incidents to the infrastructure provider who then…
OpenAlex is an open bibliographic database that has been proposed as an alternative to commercial platforms in a context defined by the aim of transforming science evaluation systems into more transparent sources based on open data. This…
Where appropriate repositories are not available to support all relevant astronomical data products, data can fall into darkness: unseen and unavailable for future reference and re-use. Some data in this category are legacy or old data, but…
Fully understanding performance is a growing challenge when building next-generation cloud systems. Often these systems build on next-generation hardware, and evaluation in realistic physical testbeds is out of reach. Even when physical…
Users wanting to monitor distributed or component-based systems often perceive them as monolithic systems which, seen from the outside, exhibit a uniform behaviour as opposed to many components displaying many local behaviours that together…
Current operating systems are complex systems that were designed before today's computing environments. This makes it difficult for them to meet the scalability, heterogeneity, availability, and security challenges in current cloud and…
The new NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS) is designed with a serviceoriented architecture (SOA) that consists of multiple customized Apache Solr search engine instances plus a collection of microservices, containerized using Docker, and…
Microservices architecture has been widely adopted to develop software systems, but some of its trade-offs are often ignored. In particular, the introduction of eventual consistency has a huge impact on the complexity of the application…
This article presents the design of an open-API-based explainable AI (XAI) service to provide feature contribution explanations for cloud AI services. Cloud AI services are widely used to develop domain-specific applications with precise…