Constructing real-world data-to-insight pipelines often involves data extraction from data lakes, data integration across heterogeneous data sources, and diverse operations from data cleaning to analysis. The design and implementation of data science pipelines require domain knowledge, technical expertise, and even project-specific insights. AI systems have shown remarkable reasoning, coding, and understanding capabilities. However, it remains unclear to what extent these capabilities translate into successful design and execution of such complex pipelines. We introduce KRAMABENCH: a benchmark composed of 104 manually-curated real-world data science pipelines spanning 1700 data files from 24 data sources in 6 different domains. We show that these pipelines test the end-to-end capabilities of AI systems on data processing, requiring data discovery, wrangling and cleaning, efficient processing, statistical reasoning, and orchestrating data processing steps given a high-level task. Our evaluation tests 5 general models and 3 code generation models using our reference framework, DS-GURU, which instructs the AI model to decompose a question into a sequence of subtasks, reason through each step, and synthesize Python code that implements the proposed design. Our results on KRAMABENCH show that, although the models are sufficiently capable of solving well-specified data science code generation tasks, when extensive data processing and domain knowledge are required to construct real-world data science pipelines, existing out-of-box models fall short. Progress on KramaBench represents crucial steps towards developing autonomous data science agents for real-world applications. Our code, reference framework, and data are available at https://github.com/mitdbg/KramaBench.

The rapid advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs) has opened new opportunities in data science, yet their practical deployment is often constrained by the challenge of discovering relevant data within large heterogeneous data lakes. Existing methods struggle with this: single-agent systems are quickly overwhelmed by large, heterogeneous files in the large data lakes, while multi-agent systems designed based on a master-slave paradigm depend on a rigid central controller for task allocation that requires precise knowledge of each sub-agent's capabilities. To address these limitations, we propose a novel multi-agent communication paradigm inspired by the blackboard architecture for traditional AI models. In this framework, a central agent posts requests to a shared blackboard, and autonomous subordinate agents -- either responsible for a partition of the data lake or general information retrieval -- volunteer to respond based on their capabilities. This design improves scalability and flexibility by eliminating the need for a central coordinator to have prior knowledge of all sub-agents' expertise. We evaluate our method on three benchmarks that require explicit data discovery: KramaBench and modified versions of DS-Bench and DA-Code to incorporate data discovery. Experimental results demonstrate that the blackboard architecture substantially outperforms baselines, including RAG and the master-slave multi-agent paradigm, achieving between 13% to 57% relative improvement in end-to-end task success and up to a 9% relative gain in F1 score for data discovery over the best-performing baselines across both proprietary and open-source LLMs. Our findings establish the blackboard paradigm as a scalable and generalizable communication framework for multi-agent systems.

The enterprises today are faced with the tough challenge of processing, storing large amounts of data in a secure, scalable manner and enabling decision makers to make quick, informed data driven decisions. This paper addresses this challenge and develops an effective enterprise data strategy in the cloud. Various components of an effective data strategy are discussed and architectures addressing security, scalability and privacy aspects are provided.

This article explores the feasibility of creating an "electronic copy" of a deceased researcher by training artificial intelligence (AI) on the data stored in their personal computers. By analyzing typical data volumes on inherited researcher computers, including textual files such as articles, emails, and drafts, it is estimated that approximately one million words are available for AI training. This volume is sufficient for fine-tuning advanced pre-trained models like GPT-4 to replicate a researcher's writing style, domain expertise, and rhetorical voice with high fidelity. The study also discusses the potential enhancements from including non-textual data and file metadata to enrich the AI's representation of the researcher. Extensions of the concept include communication between living researchers and their electronic copies, collaboration among individual electronic copies, as well as the creation and interconnection of organizational electronic copies to optimize information access and strategic decision-making. Ethical considerations such as ownership and security of these electronic copies are highlighted as critical for responsible implementation. The findings suggest promising opportunities for AI-driven preservation and augmentation of intellectual legacy.

The variety of data in data lakes presents significant challenges for data analytics, as data scientists must simultaneously analyze multi-modal data, including structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data. While Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated promising capabilities, they still remain inadequate for multi-modal data analytics in terms of accuracy, efficiency, and freshness. First, current natural language (NL) or SQL-like query languages may struggle to precisely and comprehensively capture users' analytical intent. Second, relying on a single unified LLM to process diverse data modalities often leads to substantial inference overhead. Third, data stored in data lakes may be incomplete or outdated, making it essential to integrate external open-domain knowledge to generate timely and relevant analytics results. In this paper, we envision a new multi-modal data analytics system. Specifically, we propose a novel architecture built upon the Model Context Protocol (MCP), an emerging paradigm that enables LLMs to collaborate with knowledgeable agents. First, we define a semantic operator hierarchy tailored for querying multi-modal data in data lakes and develop an AI-agent-powered NL2Operator translator to bridge user intent and analytical execution. Next, we introduce an MCP-based execution framework, in which each MCP server hosts specialized foundation models optimized for specific data modalities. This design enhances both accuracy and efficiency, while supporting high scalability through modular deployment. Finally, we propose a updating mechanism by harnessing the deep research and machine unlearning techniques to refresh the data lakes and LLM knowledges, with the goal of balancing the data freshness and inference efficiency.

Data discovery in data lakes with ever increasing datasets has long been recognized as a big challenge in the realm of data management, especially for semantic search of and hierarchical global catalog generation of tables. While large language models (LLMs) facilitate the processing of data semantics, challenges remain in architecting an end-to-end system that comprehensively exploits LLMs for the two semantics-related tasks. In this demo, we propose LEDD, an end-to-end system with an extensible architecture that leverages LLMs to provide hierarchical global catalogs with semantic meanings and semantic table search for data lakes. Specifically, LEDD can return semantically related tables based on natural-language specification. These features make LEDD an ideal foundation for downstream tasks such as model training and schema linking for text-to-SQL tasks. LEDD also provides a simple Python interface to facilitate the extension and the replacement of data discovery algorithms.

The rapid urbanization growth has underscored the need for innovative solutions to enhance transportation efficiency and safety. Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) have emerged as a promising solution in this context. However, analyzing and processing the massive and intricate data generated by ITS presents significant challenges for traditional data processing systems. This work proposes an Edge-based Data Lake Architecture to integrate and analyze the complex data from ITS efficiently. The architecture offers scalability, fault tolerance, and performance, improving decision-making and enhancing innovative services for a more intelligent transportation ecosystem. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the architecture through an analysis of three different use cases: (i) Vehicular Sensor Network, (ii) Mobile Network, and (iii) Driver Identification applications.

Machine Learning (ML) is continuously permeating a growing amount of application domains. Generative AI such as Large Language Models (LLMs) also sees broad adoption to process multi-modal data such as text, images, audio, and video. While the trend is to use ever-larger datasets for training, managing this data efficiently has become a significant practical challenge in the industry-double as much data is certainly not double as good. Rather the opposite is important since getting an understanding of the inherent quality and diversity of the underlying data lakes is a growing challenge for application-specific ML as well as for fine-tuning foundation models. Furthermore, information retrieval (IR) from expanding data lakes is complicated by the temporal dimension inherent in time-series data which must be considered to determine its semantic value. This study focuses on the different semantic-aware techniques to extract embeddings from mono-modal, multi-modal, and cross-modal data to enhance IR capabilities in a growing data lake. Articles were collected to summarize information about the state-of-the-art techniques focusing on applications of embedding for three different categories of data modalities.

Enterprises have a growing need to identify relevant tables in data lakes; e.g. tables that are unionable, joinable, or subsets of each other. Tabular neural models can be helpful for such data discovery tasks. In this paper, we present TabSketchFM, a neural tabular model for data discovery over data lakes. First, we propose a novel pre-training sketch-based approach to enhance the effectiveness of data discovery techniques in neural tabular models. Second, to further finetune the pretrained model for several downstream tasks, we develop LakeBench, a collection of 8 benchmarks to help with different data discovery tasks such as finding tasks that are unionable, joinable, or subsets of each other. We then show on these finetuning tasks that TabSketchFM achieves state-of-the art performance compared to existing neural models. Third, we use these finetuned models to search for tables that are unionable, joinable, or can be subsets of each other. Our results demonstrate improvements in F1 scores for search compared to state-of-the-art techniques (even up to 70% improvement in a joinable search benchmark). Finally, we show significant transfer across datasets and tasks establishing that our model can generalize across different tasks over different data lakes

Designing effective data manipulation methods is a long standing problem in data lakes. Traditional methods, which rely on rules or machine learning models, require extensive human efforts on training data collection and tuning models. Recent methods apply Large Language Models (LLMs) to resolve multiple data manipulation tasks. They exhibit bright benefits in terms of performance but still require customized designs to fit each specific task. This is very costly and can not catch up with the requirements of big data lake platforms. In this paper, inspired by the cross-task generality of LLMs on NLP tasks, we pave the first step to design an automatic and general solution to tackle with data manipulation tasks. We propose UniDM, a unified framework which establishes a new paradigm to process data manipulation tasks using LLMs. UniDM formalizes a number of data manipulation tasks in a unified form and abstracts three main general steps to solve each task. We develop an automatic context retrieval to allow the LLMs to retrieve data from data lakes, potentially containing evidence and factual information. For each step, we design effective prompts to guide LLMs to produce high quality results. By our comprehensive evaluation on a variety of benchmarks, our UniDM exhibits great generality and state-of-the-art performance on a wide variety of data manipulation tasks.