Matteo Riondato is a Ph.D. candidate in Computer Science at Brown University (Providence, RI) under the supervision of Prof. Eli Upfal, working on Project BIGDATA. In his research, Matteo tries to speed up Big Data analytics using tools from statistical learning theory.
Matteo's current Erdős number is 3 (Erdős → Suen → Upfal → Matteo).
He was born in Padova (Padua), in the foggy northern Italy, in 1986. After having spent his childhood playing with LEGOs and other nerdish games, he was introduced to computers, and have never left them since he was 14.
UNIX lover since the very beginning of his computer interest, he is part of the FreeBSD community as a developer with write privileges on the main source tree (a.k.a. src committer). He was one of the FreeSBIE developers and the release engineer for the FreeSBIE-2.X series (R.I.P. FreeSBIE). Nowadays, he focuses more on solving bugs: like Pulp Fiction's Mister Wolf, he enjoys solving Problems (or better, Problem Reports a.k.a. PRs).
Matteo has been keeping an active blog (Matteo's Wasps' Nest) since 2002, although at that time he did not know what blogs were. Recently, he even started twitting as @riondabsd.
More or less everything you find on this page can be found in Matteo's CV.
Email: matteo@cs.brown.edu
Room: CIT 321
Address: Box 1910, 115 Waterman Street 4th Fl., Providence, RI 02912
Twitter: Follow @riondabsd
Matteo is currently a Ph.D. Candidate in Computer Science at Brown University (he joined the program in Fall 2009) and he is lucky enough to have Prof. Eli Upfal as doctoral advisor. Expected graduation date is May 2014. The thesis committee is composed by Prof. Eli Upfal, Prof. Uğur Çetintemel (Brown CS), and Prof. Basilis Gidas (Brown Appl. Math.).
Matteo holds a Laurea (B.Sc.) in Information Engineering and a Laurea Magistrale (Sc.M.) summa cum laude in Computer Engineering from Università degli Studi di Padova, Italy, and a Sc.M. in Computer Science from Brown University.
Matteo's research is focused on the use of methods from statistical learning theory and probability in knowledge discovery, data mining (pattern extraction in transactional datasets and graphs), big data analytics, and database management (selectivity estimation, approximation of aggregate queries), and more broadly in computer science. He also has a strong belief that algorithms should provide provable guarantees on their output, but he does not regret using more heuristic-like machine learning techniques in his works. Matteo is also very interested in MapReduce and in the development of algorithms for this novel parallel/distributed architecture. Here is a 30 seconds video about Matteo's research (somewhat outdated since it's from 2011).
He is a member of the Data Management Research Group and of the Theory Group at Brown. He is a student member in Project Longview and BIGDATA.
Publications (DBLP, Google Scholar)
8) M. Riondato, F. Vandin. Finding the True Frequent Itemsets. Under submission (available on arXiv)
7) M. Riondato, J. DeBrabant, R. Fonseca, E. Upfal. PARMA: A Parallel Randomized Algorithm for Approximate Association Rules Mining in MapReduce. 21st ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM 2012), 13.4% acceptance rate (PDF, video)
6) M. Riondato, E. Upfal. Efficient Discovery of Association Rules and Frequent Itemsets through Sampling with Tight Performance Guarantees. European Conference on Machine Learning and Principles and Practice of Knowledge Discovery in Databases 2012 (ECML PKDD 2012), 23.7% acceptance rate (full version on arXiv)
5) A. Pietracaprina, G. Pucci, M. Riondato, F. Silvestri, E. Upfal. Space-Round Tradeoffs for MapReduce Computations. 26th International Conference on Supercomputing (ICS 2012), N/A acceptance rate (PDF)
4) M. Akdere, U. Çetintemel, M. Riondato, E. Upfal, S. B. Zdonik. Learning-based Query Performance Modeling and Prediction. 28th International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE 2012), 17.7% acceptance rate (PDF)
3) M. Riondato, M. Akdere, U. Çetintemel, S. B. Zdonik, E. Upfal. The VC-Dimension of SQL Queries and Selectivity Estimation Through Sampling. European Conference on Machine Learning and Principles and Practice of Knowledge Discovery in Databases 2011 (ECML PKDD 2011), 20% acceptance rate (full version on arXiv)
2) M. Akdere, U. Çetintemel, M. Riondato, E. Upfal, S. B. Zdonik. The Case for Predictive Database Systems: Opportunities and Challenges. 5th Biennial Conference on Innovative Data Systems Research (CIDR 2011) (PDF)
1) A. Pietracaprina, M. Riondato, E. Upfal, F. Vandin. Mining Top-K Frequent Itemsets Through Progressive Sampling. Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery, Volume 21, Number 2, 2010 (Springer, arXiv.)
Invited talks
Other technical writings
Academic Experiences
In summer 2013, Matteo will be at Yahoo! Research Barcelona to work with the Web Mining Group under the supervision of Dr. Francesco Bonchi.
In June and July 2012, Matteo visited the Department of Computer, Control, and Management Engineering at Sapienza University in Rome, to work with Professors Stefano Leonardi, Aris Anagnostopoulos, and Luca Becchetti, among others.
Matteo won a fellowship from the Department of Information Engineering at Università degli Studi di Padova (Padua, Italy) to spend three months (May—July 2011) to work with Prof. Eli Upfal, Prof. Andrea Pietracaprina, Prof. Geppino Pucci and Dr. Francesco Silvestri on "The Map-Reduce Paradigm: computational model and algorithms". The fellowship was funded by MIUR of Italy under Project AlgoDEEP prot. 2008TFBWL4.
In Fall 2010 and Spring 2012, Matteo was the Grad Teaching Assistant for CSCI 1550 (a.k.a. CS 155) — Probabilistic Methods in Computer Science.
In August 2010 Matteo visited Chalmers University of Technology in Göteborg, Sweden, to work with Prof. Devdatt Dubhashi. While there, he did research and helped in organizing a Seminar in "Probability and Computing", in which he was also a speaker.
From October 2008 to June 2009, Matteo was a visiting grad student at the Computer Science Department of Brown University, doing research for his Sc.M. thesis under the supervision of Prof. Eli Upfal.
Service
From April 2011 to January 2013, Matteo was the President of the Brown University Graduate Student Council. Previous roles include VicePresident of Administration (Jan—Apr 2011), member of the Finance and Communication Committees (2009—10), and representative for the Computer Science Department (2009—Apr 2011).
Throughout 2010, Matteo was in charge of organizing Theory Lunch, the weekly meeting of the Theory Group at Brown CS department. His duties involved finding a volunteer to bring lunch and a speaker (internal or external to the department) to give a presentation on a topic stricly related to theoretical computer science.
My coauthors (to feed the search engines)
Mert Akdere, Uğur Çetintemel, Justin DeBrabant, Rodrigo Fonseca, Andrea Pietracaprina, Geppino Pucci, Francesco Silvestri, Eli Upfal, Fabio Vandin, Stanley B. Zdonik, …
A 30 seconds high-level overview of my research (recorded and edited by Carleton)
If you're paranoid…
Listen
Just in case you wonder…
Matteo's Wasps' Nest, my other page, blog-like, partly in Italian
Silvio Riondato, my father, in Italian
Ezio Riondato, my grandfather, in Italian (also Ezio Riondato on Italian Wikipedia)
Only nerds do this…
Last Update: May 7th 2013