Welcome to the Data Systems Group

The Data Systems Group at the University of Waterloo's Cheriton School of Computer Science builds innovative, high-impact platforms, systems, and applications for processing, managing, analyzing, and searching the vast collections of data that are integral to modern information societies — colloquially known as “big data” technologies.

Our capabilities span the full spectrum from unstructured text collections to relational data, and everything in between including semi-structured sources such as time series, log data, graphs, and other data types. We work at multiple layers in the software stack, ranging from storage management and execution platforms to user-facing applications and studies of user behaviour.

Our research tackles all phases of the information lifecycle, from ingest and cleaning to inference and decision support.

  1. Jan. 26, 2023Data systems researchers receive 2022 ACM SIGMOD Research Highlight Award
    photo of Ken Salem, Mushi Wang and Semih Salihoglu

    Cheriton students Jeremy Chen, Yuqing Huang and Mushi Wang and Professors Semih Salihoğlu and Ken Salem have received a 2022 ACM SIGMOD Research Highlight Award for their paper “Accurate summary-based cardinality estimation through the lens of cardinality estimation graphs.” No stranger to scholarly recognition, this research earlier received the Best Experiment, Analysis and Benchmark Award at VLDB 2022, the 48th International Conference on Very Large Databases, where it was presented originally.

  2. Jan. 18, 2023Jimmy Lin named a 2022 ACM Fellow
    photo of Professor Jimmy Lin in Hawaii

    Professor Jimmy Lin has been named a 2022 ACM Fellow for his contributions to question answering, information retrieval, and natural language processing.

  3. Dec. 15, 2022Khuzaima Daudjee named 2022 ACM Distinguished Member
    photo of Professor Khuzaima Daudjee

    The Association for Computing Machinery has named Cheriton School of Computer Science Professor Khuzaima Daudjee a Distinguished Member for his outstanding scientific contributions to computing.

    “On behalf of ACM and the Distinguished Member Committee, I am delighted that you are among the inductees honored with this designation and congratulate you on this well-deserved recognition,” wrote Geraldine Fitzpatrick, Chair of the ACM Distinguished Member Committee, in her letter to Professor Daudjee.

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