The Data Systems Group at the University of Waterloo's Cheriton School of Computer Science builds innovative, high-impact platforms, systems, and applications for processing, managing, analyzing, and searching the vast collections of data that are integral to modern information societies — colloquially known as “big data” technologies.
Our capabilities span the full spectrum from unstructured text collections to relational data, and everything in between including semi-structured sources such as time series, log data, graphs, and other data types. We work at multiple layers in the software stack, ranging from storage management and execution platforms to user-facing applications and studies of user behaviour.
Our research tackles all phases of the information lifecycle, from ingest and cleaning to inference and decision support.
News
Data Systems Group researchers win Best Paper Award at DocEng’25
Postdoctoral researcher Besat Kassaie, Dr. Andrew Kane and Distinguished Professor Emeritus Frank Tompa have won a Best Paper Award at DocEng’25, the 25th ACM Symposium on Document Engineering.
Their paper, Exploiting Query Reformulation and Reciprocal Rank Fusion in Math-Aware Search Engines, introduces new methods that improve how search engines handle mathematical queries.
Professor Xiao Hu and her colleagues receive 2025 SIGMOD Research Highlight Award
Professor Xiao Hu and her collaborators Binyang Dai and Ke Yi from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology have received a 2025 SIGMOD Research Highlight Award for their paper, Reservoir Sampling over Joins.
Professor Xiao Hu and her colleagues win Distinguished Paper Award at PODS 2025
Professor Xiao Hu, and her collaborators have received a Distinguished Paper Award at the 2025 ACM SIGMOD/PODS International Conference on Management of Data.
Their paper, Fast Matrix Multiplication Meets the Submodular Width, introduces a new and unified framework for determining how efficiently any Boolean conjunctive query can be answered using fast matrix multiplication techniques.