February 28th, 9am EST
Dr. Assaf Schuster is a Professor at the Technion - Israel Institute of Technology, specializing in distributed and database systems, data streams, and cloud computing.
Talk Highlights: AMA Style Interview with Dr. Assaf Schuster
Dr. Schuster presents Complex Event Processing (CEP) — detecting patterns in real-time data streams. He explains how CEP engines use nondeterministic finite automata and evaluation trees, but face a combinatorial explosion of partial matches. He introduces data-aware optimization techniques drawing on 40 years of database join-order optimization to dramatically improve performance, and demonstrates that hybrid parallelism achieves super-linear speedups.
Key Takeaways
- The core performance nightmare in CEP is combinatorial explosion: for a pattern ABCD with 1,000 each of A, B, and C events, the first D arrival creates one billion partial matches.
- By reducing CEP plan generation to the well-studied database join-order optimization problem, decades of existing algorithms become immediately applicable — a powerful cross-pollination.
- Hybrid parallelism combining data and state parallelism achieves over three orders of magnitude throughput improvement with 24 cores — super-linear speedup from fitting in faster cache levels.
Notable Quotes
“We already proved that the CEP evaluation is equivalent to or at least as hard as an NP-complete problem. We know that deep neural networks are not very good at tackling NP-hard problems.”
“With 24 cores, the equivalence in speedup is more than three orders of magnitude — because when you reduce the amount of memory, you get super-linear speedup from working with faster levels of the memory hierarchy.”
Biography +
Assaf Schuster
Early Life and Education
Assaf Schuster, born in 1958 in Givat Brenner, Israel, is a computer scientist and Full Professor at the Technion. He earned his B.Sc. in Mathematics and Computer Science (1984) and M.Sc. in Computer Science (1986) from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, followed by his Ph.D. in Computer Science in 1991 under Eli Shamir.
Career and Contributions
Schuster joined the Technion in 1991, becoming Associate Professor in 2000 and Full Professor in 2007. His research spans distributed systems, data stream processing, and cloud computing. In 2016, he co-founded Cy-oT, a cybersecurity startup for IoT security, serving as CTO until its acquisition by Verint Systems in 2019.
Awards and Honors
- 2015: Named ACM Fellow for contributions to cloud computing
Career Timeline +
Career Timeline
- 1958: Born in Givat Brenner, Israel
- 1984: B.Sc. from Hebrew University of Jerusalem
- 1986: M.Sc. from Hebrew University
- 1991: Ph.D. from Hebrew University; joined the Technion
- 2000: Associate Professor at the Technion
- 2007: Full Professor at the Technion
- 2015: Named ACM Fellow
- 2016: Co-founded Cy-oT; served as CTO
- 2019: Cy-oT acquired by Verint Systems
