ISG Talks are sponsored by Couchbase.
Kary Zheng and Carlos Ernesto Alvarez Berumen: Translating Texera Workflows into Python
October 23 @ 1:00 pm - 2:00 pm
Our presenters for this week are Kary Zheng and Carlos Ernesto Alvarez Berumen. The details of their talk are added below.
Friday, October 23, 2026, 1:00 PM – 2:00 PM
Donald Bren Hall 3011, ICS, UC Irvine
Zoom Link: https://uci.zoom.us/s/
Zoom Meeting ID: 995 5848 3214
Light refreshments will be provided.
Title: Translating Texera Workflows into Python
Abstract
Visual workflows make it easier to build and inspect data analyses, but collaborators often need to work with the same analysis in Python. How can we move an analysis between these environments while preserving its meaning? In this talk, we present Texera’s approach to exporting visual workflows as standalone Python programs. Through a running example, we introduce the needs that motivate this work and the main ideas behind our solution: translating the computation, preserving the meaning of the data, and checking that both representations produce consistent results. Key design challenges include translating a graph of operators into Python while preserving execution dependencies, and reconciling differences in data types, null values, and timestamps between Texera and Python. We discuss how these challenges shape the system’s design and the tests used to detect differences between native and exported execution. We conclude with broader questions about portability and reproducibility across data-analysis tools.
Bio
Kary Zheng contributes to Texera’s Workflow-to-Python project. Her work includes exporting visual workflows as standalone Python programs and developing tests to compare their behavior with Texera execution.
Carlos Ernesto Alvarez Berumen is a Ph.D. student in Computer Science at the University of California, Irvine, advised by Professor Chen Li. He works on Texera and collaborates on the Workflow-to-Python project.