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.

News

Professors Khuzaima Daudjee and Sujaya Maiyya have been awarded $220,000 from the Ontario Research Fund–Research Infrastructure (ORF-RI) program. This amount was matched by the Canada Foundation for Innovation’s John R. Evans Leaders Fund (CFI-JELF), bringing total funding to $440,000.

The project, titled Scalable Infrastructure for Data-Intensive Systems, will address foundational challenges in managing and analyzing large-scale data.

Professor Jimmy Lin has been named a 2024 Fellow of the Association for Computational Linguistics in recognition of his significant contributions to question answering and information retrieval.

Established in 2011 by the Association for Computational Linguistics, ACL fellowships are conferred annually to members whose contributions to the field have been extraordinary through their scientific and technical excellence, service to the association and the community, along with broader educational and outreach activities.