Ben Sowell

Note: I graduated with my PhD in May/Aug. 2012. My first employer is Nou Data. This page is now read only, but you can find out what I'm up to on my personal page.

I am currently a PhD student in the Computer Science department at Cornell University. I work in the database group with Professor Johannes Gehrke

I am broadly interested in data management, particularly in novel applications of query processing techniques. I am currently working on the data-driven games project, which uses data management techniques to improve computer game performance.

I recently graduated from Carleton College, a small liberal-arts school in Northfield, Minnesota. Before that, I grew up in Omaha, Nebraska.

Research

In the data-driven games project, we are working to develop a scalable architecture for video games and large-scale simulations. We have developed a declarative language called SGL that allows game developers to script character behavior. SGL has been carefully designed so that it can be optimized using standard database techniques. My work has focused on developing efficient query-processing algorithms for SGL applications. More information can be found at the project page.

Prior to coming to Cornell, I worked with Professor David Liben-Nowell at Carleton College on a project involving distributed search in social networks. We examined a model using rank-based friendship, where a link is placed between two individuals with probability inversely proportional to the number of other people between them. In this setting we were able to provide a tight analysis of the performance of a greedy decentralized algorithm and improve upon the best known bound with some slight constraints on the metric space. This work was presented at the ISAAC conference in December.

Publications

• B. Sowell, W. Golab, M. A. Shah. Minuet: A Scalable Distributed Multiversion B-Tree. In Proc. VLDB 2012. (pdf)
• T. Cao, M.A. Vaz Salles, B. Sowell, Y. Yue, A. Demers, J. Gehrke, W. White. Fast Checkpoint Recovery Algorithms for Frequently Consistent Applications. In Proc. SIGMOD 2011. (pdf)
• G. Wang, M.A. Vaz Salles, B. Sowell, X. Wang, A. Demers, J. Gehrke, W. White. Behavioral Simulations in MapReduce. In Proc. VLDB 2010. (pdf).
• M.A. Vaz Salles, T. Cao, B. Sowell, A. Demers, J. Gehrke, C Koch, W. White. An Evaluation of Checkpoint Recovery for Massively Multiplayer Online Games. In Proc. VLDB 2009. (pdf).
• B. Sowell, A. Demers, J. Gehrke, N. Gupta, H. Li, W. White. From Declarative Languages to Declarative Processing in Computer Games (Perspectives Paper). In Proc. of the Fourth Biennial Conf. on Innovative Data Systems (CIDR 2009) , Jan. 2009. (pdf).
• W. White, B. Sowell, J. Gehrke, A. Demers. Declarative Processing for Computer Games . In Proc. of the 2008 ACM SIGGRAPH Sandbox Symposium (Sandbox 2008), Aug. 2008. (pdf).
• D. Barbella, G Kachergis, D. Liben-Nowell, A. Sallstrom, and B. Sowell. Depth of Field and Cautious-Greedy Routing in Social Networks. In Proc. ISAAC '07, Dec. 2007. (pdf)

Demonstrations

• T. Cao, B. Sowell, M.A. Vaz Salles, A. Demers, J. Gehrke. BRRL: A Recovery Library for Main-Memory Applications in the Cloud. In Proc. SIGMOD 2011.
• R. Albright, A. Demers, J. Gehrke, N. Gupta, H. Lee, R. Keilty, G. Sadowski, B. Sowell, and W. White. SGL: A Scalable Language for Data-Driven Games (Demonstration Paper). In Proc. SIGMOD 2008. (pdf).

Tutorials

• A. Demers, J. Gehrke, C. Koch, B. Sowell, W. White. Database research in computer games. In Proc. SIGMOD 2009. (pdf).