I co-direct the Data Systems and AI Lab and the Data Systems Group.
Personal Information
- Short bio
- Ph.D. (Berkeley) 2003; M.Eng. (MIT) 1999; B.S. (MIT) 1999.
Teaching
- Spring, 2024, 6.S079: Software Systems for Data Science
- Fall, 2023, 6.5830/6.5831 (Formerly 6.830/6.8140): Database Systems
- Spring, 2023 6.1800 (formerly 6.033), Recitation Instructor
- Fall, 2022, 6.5830/6.5831 (Formerly 6.830/6.8140): Database Systems
- Spring, 2021, 6.S079: Software Systems for Data Science
- Fall, 2021, 6.0001 and 6.0002 - Introduction to Computational Thinking and Data Science
Research
My primary research focus is on database systems, including main memory databases, data warehousing/analytics, querying video data, and machine learning for data systems.
Recent and current research projects and interests include:
- A Declarative System for Optimizing AI Workloads
- BRAD: Simplifying Cloud Data Processing
- Self-organizing data containers, and several other projects on learned data layouts.
- VaaS (Video Analytics as a service), a system for query processing over video, and various other video querying projects.
Various other projects are listed on the DSG Website and project page.
Students
Current Postdocs:
- Tianyu Li (Starting as Assistant Professor at U. Wisconsin in 2026)
Current Ph.D. students:
- Sushrut Borkar
- Zhuohan Guo
- Darryl Ho
- Ferdi Kossmann
- Sivaprasad Sudhir
- Ziniu Wu
Graduated Ph.D. students:
- Daniel Abadi (U. Maryland)
- Adam Marcus
- Ryan Newton (U. of Indiana)
- Arvind Thiagarajan (co-supervised with Hari Balakrishnan)
- Evan Jones
- Eugene Wu (Columbia)
- Yuan Mei (Facebook)
- Alvin Cheung (UC Berkeley)
- Manasi Vartak (Verta, Inc)
- Yi Lu (Google)
- Anil Shanbhag (Instabase, Inc)
- Favyen Bastani (AllenAI)
- Joana Matos Fonseca de Trindade
- Oscar Moll
- Albert Kim
- Matt Perron
Publications and Talks (very out of date)
Awards and Honors
- SIGMOD Edgar H. Codd Innovations Award, 2024
- ACM Fellow, 2020
- ACM Sensys Test of Time Award, 2019
- SIGMOBILE Test of Time Award, 2018
- MIT Burgess (1952) & Elizabeth Jamieson Award for Excellence in Teaching, 2018
- SIGMOD Test of Time Award, 2017
- SIGMOD Contributions Award, 2016
- VLDB Test of Time Award, 2015
- SIGMOD Test of Time Award, 2013
- CIDR Best Paper Award, 2013
- VLDB Best Demo Award, 2011
- Sensys Best Paper Award, 2009
- VLDB Best Paper Award, 2007
- IBM Faculty Development Award, 2007
- Sloan Fellowship, 2007
- SenSys Best Demo Award, 2006
- MobiCom Best Paper Award, 2006
- MIT TR35 Outstanding Researcher Under the Age of 35, 2005
- NSF CAREER Award, 2005
- VLDB 2004 Best Paper Award
- C. V. Ramamoorthy Distinguished Research Award, UC Berkeley, 2003
Company Involvement
- Chief Scientist of Cambridge Mobile Telematics, a Cambridge, MA-based startup that develops solutions to make roads safer by making drivers better.
- Technical advisor to Heavy.ai, a GPU-based database analytics and visualization startup.
- Technical advisor to Instabase, a platform to help people solve problems with data.
- Technical advisor to B12, a startup focused on orchestrating creative workers to help build technology products.
- Co-founder of Vertica, a column-oriented database system. Vertica was acquired by HP in 2011.