A Transducers-based Programming Framework for Efficient Data Transformation

Many data analytics and scientific applications rely on data transformation tasks, such as encoding, decoding, parsing of structured and unstructured data, and conversions between data formats and layouts. Previous work has shown that data transformation can represent a performance bottleneck for data analytics workloads. The transducers computational abstraction can be used to express a wide range of data transformations, and recent efforts have proposed configurable engines implementing various transducer models (from finite state transducers, to pushdown transducers, to extended models). This line of research, however, is still at an early stage. Notably, expressing data transformation using transducers requires a paradigm shift, impacting programmability.