I am a researcher in computer science, specializing in databases and human-AI interaction. In 2027, I will join Carnegie Mellon University as an Assistant Professor in the Computer Science Department (CSD) and, by courtesy, the HCII.
The mission of my research is: to help people work effectively with data. We work across the full data stack, from database systems that manage and process data—to tools that help people analyze data, communicate what they learn, and make decisions. We design systems and user interfaces that use AI, and we study how to make them accurate, efficient, and easy to guide.
My PhD is in EECS from UC Berkeley, where I worked with Aditya Parameswaran and built the DocETL stack (3.7k+ GitHub stars, used by public defenders, climate scientists, and more). My undergrad is in CS from Stanford.
Current mentees
- Andrew Cheng (undergrad)
- Sasha Singh (undergrad)
Past mentees
- Parth Asawa (undergrad → PhD student @ UC Berkeley; CRA Undergraduate Award Honorable Mention)
- Ruiqi Chen (MS → PhD student @ University of Michigan CSE)
- Ankush Garg (MS → Senior Data Scientist @ Clarkson Consulting)
- Rachel Lin (undergrad, MS → Software Engineer @ Opto)
- Aditi Mahajan (undergrad → Google)
- Nikhil & Vinay Rao (high school → undergrads @ UC Berkeley EECS)
- Quentin Romero Lauro (undergrad → CEO @ Inspector, YC 2025; CRA Undergraduate Award Winner)
- Reya Vir (undergrad → PhD student @ Columbia; NSF GRFP recipient)
- Yujie Wang (undergrad → Google)
- Lindsey Wei (undergrad → PhD student @ Berkeley; CRA Undergraduate Award Honorable Mention)
Recent news
- We wrote What Do Users Actually Do with LLM-Powered Data Systems? for the June 2026 issue of the IEEE Data Engineering Bulletin.
- Two papers, Multi-Objective Agentic Rewrites for Unstructured Data Processing and Featurized-Decomposition Join, will appear at VLDB 2026. See you in Boston in August!
- Two papers, Cut Costs, Not Accuracy and Task Cascades, appeared at SIGMOD 2026!
- I got hooded! I will officially graduate from UC Berkeley in summer 2026.
- RAG Without the Lag won a Best Paper Award at CHI 2026!
- The stars aligned, and I got a faculty job! See you in Pittsburgh in 2027. I will be recruiting PhD students in the upcoming admissions cycle, so please mention my name in your application.
Academic service
Reviewer: VLDB (2027–), UIST (2024–), CHI (2024–), NeurIPS (2021, 2022)
Organizer: DEEM Workshop at SIGMOD (2023–2025)