Service and leadership
Leadership
- 2026
- General Chair, IEEE ICDE 2026 (Montreal, May 2026), the flagship data engineering conference, with Fei Chiang.
- 2027
- Demonstration Chair, VLDB 2027.
- Ongoing
- Editor, ACM SIGMOD Blog.
- April 2026
- Dagstuhl Seminar 26161, “Managing Vector Data for RAG”. Invited participant and technical lead; led the Agentic Systems cross-topic session and delivered a Gong Show talk.
- May 2026
- ICDE 2026 panel, “What can agents do for databases?”, with Fatma Özcan (moderator), Wenjie Zhang, Aditya Parameswaran and Bolin Ding.
- 2022 to 2024
- General Co-Chair, International Workshop on Data Systems Meet Data Science (DSDS).
Program committees
- ACM SIGMOD: 2016, 2021, 2023 (associate editor), 2025 (demo committee), 2026, 2027
- VLDB / PVLDB: 2017 to 2027 (2025, 2024, 2023, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017)
- IEEE ICDE: 2023, 2016
- The Web Conference 2023
- EDBT 2023
- ISWC: 2022, 2021
- KDD 2021
Journals and proposals
Regular reviewer for ACM Transactions on Database Systems (TODS), the VLDB Journal, IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering (TKDE) and IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems (TPDS). Proposal reviewer for NSERC and MITACS.
Recognition
Distinguished Reviewer Awards: SIGMOD 2025 and PVLDB 2018.
Selected invited talks
- “Architecture Over Model: Agentic Systems for Data-Intensive Domains.” Agentic Systems cross-topic session, Dagstuhl Seminar 26161, Germany, April 2026.
- “What Agents Can Do for Databases.” Position panel, ICDE 2026, Montreal, May 2026.
- “Advancing Domain-Specific Intelligence with LLMs and KGs: A Five-Year Journey.” DBML Workshop at ICDE 2025, Hong Kong, May 2025.
- “ChatGPT versus Traditional Question Answering for KGs.” Apple Knowledge Platform team, March 2023. Related seminars at Simon Fraser University (2023) and the University of Waterloo Data Systems Group (2022).