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Now in its third decade, the Conference on Innovative Data Systems Research (CIDR) is an annual event focused on research into new techniques for data management. Last month, the organizers of CIDR 2025 presented two Test of Time awards for papers published in conference years 2003, 2005, and 2007 that had great impact over the last twenty years. One of them (“The Design of the Borealis Stream Processing Engine”) was the work of two Brown CS faculty members and six alums: Khosrowshahi University Professor of Computer Science Ugur Çetintemel, Professor of Computer Science Stan Zdonik, Yanif Ahmad (now at Google), Jeong-Hyon Hwang (now at University at Albany), Alexander Rasin (now at DePaul University), Nesime Tatbul (now at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Intel’s Parallel Computing Lab), and Ying Xing (now at Fidelity Investments). Their co-authors included Daniel Abadi, Magdalena Balazinska, Mitch Cherniack, Wolfgang Lindner, Anurag S. Maskey, and Esther Ryvkina.

“TelegraphCQ (CIDR 2003) and Borealis (CIDR 2005),” the award committee writes, “inspired new functionality in streaming systems and led the architectural thinking that significantly influenced academia as well as the industry.”

Borealis was a second-generation distributed stream processing engine co-developed by Brown University, Brandeis University, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In addition to core distributed processing and fault tolerance techniques that are now commonly used in modern stream processing systems, it introduced advanced stream processing capabilities required by the newly-emerging stream processing applications of the time. In their paper, the authors provided sample real-world applications to demonstrate an innovative set of features to dynamically revise query results and modify query specifications, including revision records, time travel, and control lines.

Today, Ugur leads Brown University’s Database Group, whose current interests include systems at the intersection of databases and machine learning. Stan continues to specialize in database management systems, and his current work addresses observability in systems.

For more information, please click the link that follows to contact Brown CS Communications Manager Jesse C. Polhemus.