Ihab Francis Ilyas

Professor Emeritus / Adjunct Professor

Cheriton School of Computer Science, University of Waterloo
200 University Ave. West
Waterloo, Ontario, Canada N2L 3G1

email: ilyas at uwaterloo.ca

Short Biography

Books Data Cleaning, ACM Books Ihab F. Ilyas and Xu Chu
Startups and Software Release I'm fortunate to have a great group of grad students and collaborators to build systems based on industry problems. CEO, Co-founder, Inductiv, a Waterloo-based startup on using AI for Structured Data Cleaning, 2019 (acquired by Apple) Co-founder, Tamr, a leading startup in using machine learning for large-scale data integration, 2013 HoloClean on Github: an open-source platform for using machine learning in error detection and repair.
Blog Post: AI Should not Leave Structured Data Behind! (Medium - Towards Data Science) The Quest for High Quality Data (O'Rielly Media) How to Clean Noisy and Erroneous Big Data Using Machine Learning (Tamr Blog) Data Cleaning is a Machine Learning Problem that Needs Data Systems Help! (ACM SIGMOD Blog) Three Enablers for ML in Data Unification: Trust, Legacy and Scale (O'Rielly Media) HoloClean, a Machine Learning Approach to Data Cleaning
Surveys and Long Papers Probabilistic Ranking Techniques in Relational Databases (Synthesis Lectures on Data Management) March 2011, 71 pages, (doi:10.2200/S00344ED1V01Y201103DTM014 Ihab F. Ilyas and Mohamed A. Soliman Foundation and Trends Paper: Trends in Cleaning Relational Data: Consistency and Deduplication (Author Copy) November 2015, Foundations and Trends in Databases: Vol. 5: No. 4, pp 281-393 Ihab F. Ilyas and Xu Chu

CAREER HIGHLIGHTS

Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, 2024
IEEE Fellow, 2022
ACM Fellow, 2020
Co-founder, Inductiv, a Waterloo-based startup on using AI for Structured Data Cleaning, 2019 (acquired by Apple)
Co-founder, Tamr, a leading startup in using machine learning for large-scale data integration, 2013
NSERC-Thomson Reuters Chair of Data Quality, 2018
ACM SIGMOD vice-chair, 2017
VLDB Endowment Board of Trustees, 2016
Google Faculty Award, 2014
ACM Distinguished Scientist, 2014
NSERC Discovery Accelerator, 2014-2018, NSERC
Cheriton Faculty Fellowship, 2013-2016, University of Waterloo
ACM SIGMOD 2015 Best Demo Award
Ontario Early Researcher Award, 2008, Government of Ontario
IBM CAS Faculty Fellow, 2006-2010, IBM
Taha Hussein Medal for top 10 high school students in the nation, 1990, Ministry of Education, Egypt

RESEARCH

Publications: [DBLP] [Google Scholar]

Students and Postdoctoral Fellows

Graduated:

Aoqian Zhang (Postdoc, 2020)
Shrinu Kushagra (Postdoc, 2020)
Lanjun Wang (Postdoc, 2017)
Alexandra Roatis (Postdoc, 2016)

Chang Ge (PhD 2022) - Assistant Professor, University of Minnesota
Alireza Heydari (PhD 2021)
Hemant Saxena (PhD 2021) - SAP
Mina Farid (PhD, 2020) - Inductiv (Apple)
Xu Chu (PhD, 2017) - Assistant Professor, Georgia Institute of Technology
Jeffrey Pound (co-supervised by Grant Weddell) (PhD 2013) - SAP
George Beskales (PhD 2012) - Tamr Inc.
Amr El-Helw (PhD 2012) - Greenplum
Mohamed A. Soliman (PhD 2010) - Greenplum
Sobhan Niknamian (Masters 2021)
Omar Attia (Masters 2021) - Inductiv (Apple)
Michael Azmy (Masters 2019)
Jian Li (Masters 2018) - Google
Anam Shadab (Masters 2018)
John Morcos (Masters 2015) - Microsoft
Hella Hoffmann (Masters 2015) - Thomson Reuters
Artur Galiullin (Masters 2013)
Mina Farid (Masters 2012) - Grad School
Mina Saleeb (Masters 2012) - Oracle
Hiren Patel (Masters 2010) - Microsoft
Nan Jiang (Masters 2009)