Natacha Crooks

PSA: Following a sample of my latest teaching review: "Prof Crooks's accent is somewhat distracting. I think it's something to do with the rise in pitch at the end of a sentence". I will now be adopting a Texas drawl in honour of my UT PhD. Please bear with me as I perfect it over the next year.

Rubio Reportedly Pauses New International Student Visa Interviews More than 1.1 million international students were enrolled at U.S. colleges and universities in the 2023-2024 school year.

The US Administration has indefinitely blocked *all* student visa applicants from getting a visa interview.

Worldwide, unconditional, no end date. All.

International students are crucial to the US university system, American innovation, and future US prosperity.

They’re basically just trying to kill off US higher education as an industry at this point. Even a delay will pose a critical decision for thousands of prospective students whose futures are now in the air.

It’s that time of the year again, when the air smells fresh, the flowers are blooming and systems researchers are in a windowless room because it’s the SOSP deadline! I wrote these hints on writing an SOSP paper some time ago but it’s still a great reference. irenezhang.net/blog/2021/06...

Thanks!

Very grateful to be part of the 2025 Sloan Research Fellow cohort.

Thank you my fantastic students and amazing colleagues who have made this possible!

Many of them will be graduating soon. Hire them!

Same man. Same.

📢📢VLDB26 (@vldb.bsky.social) will have a ShadowPC! Apply at forms.office.com/e/XYihKj4UKq by March 1! Great opportunity for folk who are new to the data management community & want to gain paper reviewing experience. More info at application form. Chairs: @zistvan.bsky.social, Tianzheng Wang, & I.

Anyone currently applying for a green card seeing their estimated processing time creep up significantly?

I wanted to go through the rest of the disaggregated OLTP papers in detail, as I'd missed a few, so I'm re-reading everything and incrementally filling in more papers on transactional.blog/notes-on/dis...

Recent additions are overviews for Aurora Serverless and PolarFS.

Continuing from yesterday's blog post, today I look at an interesting isolation edge-case from the literature: Fekete's Anomaly. How does it fit in to our theme of achieving performance, scalability, and reliability through reducing coordination? New blog post here: brooker.co.za/blog/2025/02...

Blue Bottle can now only vr consumed while boarding a Waymo car.

Still finding it a lot harder to see the interesting posts. Hopefully, just a question if time!

Well this is going to make work interesting ...

I’m an NSF panel reviewer that was scheduled to meet today. Just got notice that all NSF panels were canceled today. I reviewed some innovative proposals in support of students. Devastating if these scholars don’t get to do this work. For the love of science & students I hope this is just a delay.💔

OSTEP for OS!

CMU 15-799 :: Special Topics in Databases: Query Optimization (Spring 2025) This course is a hands-on exploration of the most challenging problem in computer science: database query optimization. It will cover the classical and state-of-the-art methods and algorithms for conv...

Spring 2025 @cmudb.bsky.social Course: OPTIMIZE! A Journey Through Database Query Optimization
This is a survey course on how to build a SQL optimizer from scratch covering foundational and state-of-the-art implementations. All lectures available on YouTube: 15799.courses.cs.cmu.edu/spring2025/

A poodle, a latte, California sun and @andypavlo.bsky.social's new query optimizer lecture course. Not a bad start to a Saturday morning walk.

Female colleagues in CS: how often a year do you get mistaken for one of your male colleagues' secretary?

I'm already at one this year and it's not even Feb!

PS: you don't want me coordinating your calendar. I will accidentally double book you and schedule 7 am meetings.

Distributed Systems Researcher: Crash Omission failure model.

Dear Students, as University X require me to rate your artistitic ability, and University Y require me to rate your competency in a foreign language. I henceforth require all meetings to be conducted in French while dancing a cèilidh as a precondition to me writing a reference.

Thank you.

New blog post, diving a little deeper on Snapshot Isolation and Serializability, through the lens of the coordination required to implement them: brooker.co.za/blog/2024/12...

I was disappointed to see that Brown no longer asked us to rate our students' artistic ability though.

I would too, but I'm too busy rating my students like/dislike of the colour blue on a scale from 1 to 10.

There is a special place in hell for schools that require you to rate applicants across 10 axes for recommendation letters and don't just let you upload the standard PDF.

The PaPoC workshop is once again accepting submissions on distributed consistency. Deadline 15 January papoc-workshop.github.io/2025/cfp.html

I was recently on a panel on "What are important data systems problems, ignored by research?" with @andypavlo.bsky.social and Allison Lee moderated by Viktor Leis - here is the write-up of the discussion databasearchitects.blogspot.com/2024/12/what...

🛬🛂if you are planning to come to SIGMOD in Berlin, make sure to meet your corresponding visa and travel requirements in a timely manner. We have now curated the relevant links to official websites.
2025.sigmod.org/visa.shtml

I am disappointed to see that Brown no longer requires me to rate the artistic ability of the people I am recommending me for PhD admissions in CS. I was enjoying the mandatory tap dancing interview prior to agreeing to write them a letter.