About

I am an Assistant Professor in the Kahlert School of Computing at the University of Utah, where I co-lead the UtahDB research group. I received my Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of California, Santa Barbara, where I was co-advised by Professor Divyakant Agrawal and Professor Amr El Abbadi.
Besides research, I enjoy trying new food, watching movies, and playing tennis and badminton. I'm also a trumpet player in which I played trumpet solo in Danzón No. 2 at the Disney Hall.

I am honored to have received the Microsoft Research PhD Fellowship from Microsoft Research, Charles Dana Fellowship, research gifts from Snowflake.

I am always looking for highly motivated students who are interested in data systems. Check out my research interests and feel free to reach out. Interested in collaboration? Drop me an email and let's chat!

News

Open-Source Projects

SWAN-AISQL

A DuckDB extension and Python package that brings LLM-based semantic operators (ai_filter, ai_classify, ai_score, ai_complete, ai_agg, ai_embed, ai_image) into SQL, with an optimizer that deduplicates LLM calls, evaluates AI joins over distinct pair domains, and applies learned predicate ordering and early stopping.

GitHub · pip install swan-aisql

SWANBench

A benchmark of 120 "beyond-database" questions over BIRD databases that require combining LLM knowledge with SQL. SWAN 2.0 also measures how well systems plan their LLM calls, tracking quality, number of calls, tokens, cost, and latency, with a cache proxy for free, reproducible reruns.

GitHub

JEVDB

A scalable semantic database system for efficient and cost-effective semantic query processing over unstructured data. JEVDB answers most semantic questions with a low latency decision models and sends only the uncertain cases to large generative LLMs.

Website · GitHub · Paper

Redwood Storage Engine, FoundationDB

Redwood is led by Steve Atherton. I contributed on monitoring, caching, and scheduling disk I/O during my two summer internships at Snowflake.

Most of my contributions can be found here.

Selected Publications

Integrating LLMs into Data Systems

NL2SQL is a Solved Problem... Not!

Avrilia Floratou, Fotis Psallidas, Fuheng Zhao, Shaleen Deep, Gunther Hagleither, Wangda Tan, Joyce Cahoon, et al.

Work done while interning at Microsoft Gray Systems Lab

CIDR 2024

Streaming Algorithms

Storage Engines