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Pedro Vidigal in an orange jacket on the cliffs at Neist Point, Skye

Pedro Vidigal

VP Applied AI and Support at Yugabyte

I lead Applied AI and Support at Yugabyte: a production AI platform for database operations, and the support organisation that uses it every day. Here I publish what the evaluations show, including the results that reversed.

Now

as of

  • Running Hagen, the AI agent that drafts the first root-cause analysis for YugabyteDB support, in production. How it works, YFTT 162 →
  • Keeping an archive of European electricity data, five countries so far, that refreshes itself every day and re-checks the trailing ninety for restatements. A day on the grid →
  • Tracking a pre-registered test of the Portuguese season as it plays out, against a prediction sealed before kick-off. The season as it stands →

Everything, by date

RSS

Studies published here, and work reviewed or hosted elsewhere, in one list. A talk is labelled as a talk: it carries no external review and is not listed as though it did.

  1. Study
    Putting an agent on the incident queue: what I measured before I trusted it

    I run Applied AI and Support at Yugabyte. Both halves of that title report to the same outcome: how well, and how soon, we help a customer who needs us. So when we put an AI agent in front of the support engineers, the question was never "which model scores highest". It was: can an engineer act on what this agent says, how often will it cost them time, and can we tell in advance.

  2. Live
    The Portuguese season as it stands

    This page changes. Every other report here is dated and finished. This one tracks a season in progress against a test that was sealed before the season started, and it will keep changing until that test resolves on 15 November 2026.

  3. Study
    How much of a booking index is real?

    A club's yellows-per-foul rate over one season is mostly noise. 15% of the spread between clubs is a real club property; the other 85% is the Poisson accident of one season's bookings.

  4. Study
    The lever nobody pulls

    Whether a foul is punished depends enormously on where and when it happens. A foul in your own defensive fifth is carded 31.4% of the time; the same offence in the attacking fifth, 8.9%. A foul in the opening quarter of an hour is carded 6.5% of the time; after ninety minutes, 25.6%.

  5. Study
    A club that fouls with impunity, and the four ways I was wrong about it

    Across eleven European leagues, how often a team is booked per foul it commits depends mostly on how strong that team was expected to be that afternoon. Heavy underdogs are booked more, heavy favourites less, in all eleven leagues, and no club identity is involved.

  6. Study
    What free football data can still tell you

    I wanted to start this project by measuring fouls and cards. Before writing any model, I checked what data was available. That check turned out to be the more interesting result, so it is Week 1.

  7. Talk
    Hagen: How our AI support agent works

    YugabyteDB Friday Tech Talks, Episode 162

    How a production AI agent drafts the first root-cause analysis for a distributed database. A single customer diagnostic bundle can hold 50 to 100 million lines of logs. A deterministic layer extracts and normalises the evidence first; the model reasons over what that layer prepared rather than choosing what it reads. Covers the architecture, what worked, and where the system still falls short of its own target.

  8. Peer-reviewed
    From TextBlob to LLM Agents: Sentiment Model Selection for B2B Technical Support with CSAT Ground Truth

    ACL 2026 — Industry Track

    A five-year case study of sentiment model selection for customer satisfaction (CSAT) prediction in B2B technical support. The evaluation uses the complete population of CSAT-rated tickets from an enterprise software company: over 500 tickets comprising ~2,500 customer comments from 100+ organizations over five years. 17 approaches across 5 paradigms, plus 11 fine-tuning experiments.

Earlier work, elsewhere

The subject changed four times before this site: SAP, distributed databases, running teams, applied AI. This is the record of that, from conference talks, an employer blog and a personal archive. Not reviewed, and not held to the standard above. This site is the first time the method was written down.

  • Pythian blog
    Leading Through Crisis – What Ernest Shackleton Can Teach Us About the COVID Pandemic

    In January 1915, polar explorer Ernest Shackleton's ship became trapped in ice near Antarctica. For the next two years, he kept his crew of 27 men alive on a drifting ice cap, before leading them to safety.

  • Pythian blog
    Cassandra Vulnerability - CVE-2020-13946 - Apache Cassandra RMI Rebind Vulnerability

    On September 1, 2020, Apache disclosed a security vulnerability for Apache Cassandra. It's possible for a local attacker without access to the Apache Cassandra process or configuration files, to manipulate the RMI registry to perform a man-in-the-middle attack and capture user names and passwords used to access the JMX interface.

    Apache Cassandra · JMX

  • Talk
    Capacity Planning Using Facebook Prophet

    DataStax Accelerate 2019, National Harbor, Washington DC · with Valerie Parham-Thompson · recording, 26 min

    “When will my server run out of resources?” This is a question on the minds of many experienced database administrators. This is particularly relevant in Cassandra given that, as data grows, compactions get triggered to keep the database healthy.

    Facebook Prophet · Apache Cassandra

  • Talk
    Documentation, documentation, documentation!!!

    Distributed Data Summit 2018, San Francisco · no recording

    The purpose of this talk is to discuss the importance of the documentation in an open source project such as Cassandra, and showing how easy it can be for anyone to build and improve the Apache Cassandra documentation.

    Apache Cassandra

  • Talk
    Multi-Cloud Cassandra with Terraform and Ansible

    DataOps Barcelona 2018, Barcelona · with Carlos Rolo · recording, 30 min

    Given Cassandra nature to scale, automation is an important tool to know. Also, to improve resilience, some go to multi-cloud deployments.

    Apache Cassandra · Terraform · Ansible

  • Talk
    Cassandra B side, the errors we made and what we learned

    DataOps Barcelona 2018, Barcelona · with Carlos Rolo · recording, 42 min

    We are with Cassandra since 0.6 and while normally we like to talk about our feats, our experience also comes from our mistakes. In this talk, we will go over some of our (big) mistakes and lessons learned that way.

    Apache Cassandra

  • Pythian blog
    Backup strategies in Cassandra

    Cassandra is a distributed, decentralized, fault-tolerant system. Data is replicated throughout multiple nodes (centers) across various data centers.

    Apache Cassandra

  • Talk
    Building an Enterprise Grade App Using Apache Cordova and OpenUI5

    ApacheCon North America 2017, Miami · no recording

    There is a need growing need for fast deployment of enterprise-grade mobile applications and web apps responsive to all devices and running on the browser of your choice.

    Apache Cordova · OpenUI5

  • Talk
    IoT for a Fleet: Building a Route Optimization Platform Using an Open Source Stack

    ApacheCon North America 2017, Miami · no recording

    Fleet ownership and maintenance can be a big part of a company's cost. Pedro will tell you how to create a competitive advantage by reducing operating expenses and increasing profits with telematics and route optimization, using an Open Source Stack including Cassandra DB, OpenStreetMap and Optaplanner.

    Apache Cassandra · OpenStreetMap · OptaPlanner

  • 2010 to 2016Archive
    ABAP Development Blog

    32 posts on Blogger, the longer SAP record: business rules, Web Dynpro, unit tests, SAP from Python.

    ABAP · SAP · BRFplus · Web Dynpro · ABAP Unit · PyRFC

  • 2013 to 2015Archive
    SAP and ABAP notes

    10 notes on a WordPress blog that once answered on this domain. Its dated paths still arrive here and are forwarded there.

    ABAP · BRFplus · SAP