Continuous data streams are ubiquitous and represent such a high volume of data that they cannot be stored to disk, yet it is often crucial for them to be analyzed in real-time. Stream processing is a programming paradigm that processes these immediately, and enables continuous analytics. Our objective is to make it easier for analysts, with little programming experience, to develop continuous analytics applications directly. We propose enhancing a spreadsheet, a pervasive tool, to obtain a programming platform for stream processing. We present the design and implementation of an enhanced spreadsheet that enables visualizing live streams, live programming to compute new streams, and exporting computations to be run on a server where they can be shared with other users, and persisted beyond the life of the spreadsheet.

Dr. Olivier Tardieu is Research Staff Member in the Programming Technologies Department at IBM’s TJ Watson Research Center, NY, USA. His research interests include programming languages design and implementation, parallel and distributed computing, program analysis, safety critical systems, and fault tolerance. He is one of the lead designers and implementers of the X10 programming language, the APGAS runtime for distributed programming, ActiveSheets, and the CloudLens language for log analytics. He received a PhD in Computer Science from Ecole des Mines de Paris, France in 2004 and is a graduate of Ecole Polytechnique, France.