FDB Group

Ahmet Kara

Ahmet earned his PhD from the University of Dortmund in 2016 in the area of Logics and Automata on data words and data trees and their applications in formal system verification. He then joined the FDB group as a postdoc in October 2016. He contributes to the principles of factorized computation and its incremental maintenance.

Antonia Kormpa

Antonia earned her MSc in Computer Science and BSc in Computer Engineering and Informatics from University of Patras, Greece. She is a first year PhD student.

Nadia Knorozova

Nadia completed a BA in Computer Science from the University of Minnesota - Twin Cities, followed by an MSc in Computer Science at the University of Oxford. She also worked as software engineer in industry, for three years before starting her MSc and then again three years before starting her PhD at UZH in February 2021.

Dan Olteanu

Dan earned his PhD from the University of Munich. He joined Zurich in May 2020 as full professor and head of the DAST group, after spending almost 13 years as professor at the University of Oxford. His industrial experience includes part-time computer scientist positions for LogicBlox from Aug 2013 to Aug 2017 and for RelationalAI since Sept 2017. Besides factorized databases, Dan has contributed to research and development in probabilistic databases, incomplete information, streaming XML queries, and Datalog engines. He has been the head of the FDB project since its inception.

Cédric Renggli

Cédric earned his PhD from ETH Zurich in 2022 on the topic of Building Data-Centric Systems for Machine Learning Development and Operations. He joined the group in autumn 2022. His research interests include machine learning system; data management for machine learning; foundation of data-centric AI.

Personal website: https://rengglic.github.io/

Nils Vortmeier

Nils earned his PhD from TU Dortmund University in 2019 on the topic of dynamic descriptive complexity theory. He joined the group in autumn 2020.

Haozhe Zhang

Haozhe earned his MSc in Computer Science from Oxford in 2017 and BSc in Computer Science from The University of Nottingham in 2016. He is currently a second year PhD student and contributes to incremental maintenance of analytical workloads.

Djordje Zivanovic

Djordje Zivanovic earned his MSc in Electrical engineering and Computer Science and BSc in Electrical engineering from University of Belgrade, Serbia. He is a first year PhD student and contributes to In-Database Linear Algebra.

We are fortunate to collaborate with world-class researchers from industry and academia:

• Mahmoud Abo-Khamis , Computer Scientist (RelationalAI)

• Ryan R. Curtin , Computer Scientist (RelationalAI)

• Benjamin Moseley , Professor of Computer Science (Carnegie Mellon University)

• Hung Q. Ngo , Computer Scientist (RelationalAI)

• XuanLong Nguyen , Professor of Statistics (U. Michigan)

• Milos Nikolic , Lecturer in Databases (U. Edinburgh)
  Former departmental lecturer in the FDB team

• Maximilian Schleich , Postdoctoral Scholar in Computer Science (U. Washington)
  Former PhD student in the FDB team

• Amir Shaikhha , Lecturer in Data Centric Systems (U. Edinburgh)
  Former departmental lecturer in the FDB team

• Dan Suciu , Professor of Computer Science (U. Washington)

• Jakub Závodný (DPhil, October 2010 - Jan 2014).
  First employment: Google (Zurich, Switzerland)

• Nurzhan Bakibayev (MSc in CS, April - September 2011).
  First employment: Google (London, UK)

• Szymon Wyleżoł (4th year Maths&CS, October 2011 - April 2012).
  First employment: Microsoft (Redmond, USA).

• Tomáš Kočiský (4th year Maths&CS, October 2011 - April 2012).
  First position: PhD in CS (Oxford, UK).

• Laura Draghici (MSc in CS, April - September 2013).
  Employment: Amazon (London, UK), then Twitter (San Francisco, USA).

• Joe Kirk (MSc in CS, April - September 2015).
  First employment: Ensoft (London, UK).

• Lambros Petrou (MSc in CS, April - September 2015).
  First employment: Amazon (London, UK).

• Maximilian Schleich (MSc in CS, April - September 2015).
  First employment: PhD in CS (Oxford, UK).

• Radu Ciucanu (postdoc, June 2015 - June 2016).
  First employment: Maître de Conférences (Clermont-Ferrand, France).

• Pierre-Yves Bigourdan (MSc in CS, April - September 2016).
  First employment: BBC (London, UK).

• Nadezda Knorozova (MSc in CS, April - September 2016).
  First employment: LogicBlox (Atlanta, USA).

• Antonio Lombardo (MSc in CS, April - September 2016)

• Lukas Köbis (4th year, October 2016 - April 2017).
  First employment: WhatsApp (Menlo Park, California).

• Amir Payberah (postdoc; April - Aug 2017).
  First employment: University of Oxford (Oxford, UK).
  Now Assistant Professor in the Department of Software and Computer Systems, KIT (Stockholm, Sweden).

• Denis Rochau (MSc in CS, April - Aug 2017).
  First employment: Palantir Technologies (London, UK).

• Ruth Wells (MSc in CS, April - Aug 2017)
  First employment: Citizens Advice (London, UK).

• Radu Bogdan Berteanu (4th year, October 2017 - May 2018)

• Alexandru Valeanu (3rd year CS, October 2017 - May 2018)
  First position: 4th year in CS (Oxford, UK).

• Bas van Geffen (MSc in CS, April - September 2018)
  First employment: booking.com (Amsterdam, NL)

• Wouter Verlaek (MSc in CS, April - September 2018)
  First employment: Improbable (London, UK)

• Milos Nikolic (fixed-term Departmental Lecturer, September 2016 - September 2018)
  First employment: Tenure-track Lecturer in Databases (University of Edinburgh, UK).

• Nofar Carmeli (visiting researcher, January 2019 - February 2019)
  Nofar was a visiting researcher in the FDB group. She is a PhD student in the Data and Knowledge group at the Technion, advised by Prof. Benny Kimelfeld.

• Yu Tang (DPhil, October 2015 - April 2019)

• Gabriel-Robert Ineluş (4th year CS, October 2018 - May 2019)
  Distinction (research project and overall performance).
  Microsoft Prize for best 4th-year Computer Science project.
  First employment: Google (London, UK).

• Alexandru Valeanu (4th year CS, October 2018 - May 2019)
  First employment: Microsoft (Seattle, USA).

• Guansu Wang (4th year Maths & CS, October 2018 - May 2019)
  Distinction (overall performance).
  First employment: Facebook (London, UK).

• Alexandru Ghita (MSc in CS, April - September 2019).

• Maximilian Schleich (DPhil, October 2015 - January 2020).
  First employment: Postdoctoral Researcher, U. Washington (Seattle, USA)

• Fabian Peternek (PostDoc, March 2018 - April 2020)

• Karen Barnes (Project Administrator, June 2016 - April 2020)

• Amir Shaikhha (fixed-term Departmental Lecturer, January 2019 - August 2020)
  First employment: Tenure-track Lecturer in Data Centric Systems (University of Edinburgh, UK).

• George Chichirim (3rd year, October 2019 - May 2020)