Tim Kraska

Tim Kraska is an Associate Professor in MIT's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), member of the Data Systems Group (DSG) and co-director of the Data System and AI Lab (DSAIL@CSAIL) at MIT, an industry sponsored lab consisting 8 faculty members with the goal to explore ways to enhance systems using ML and build systems for ML. Recently, Tim co-founded einblick analytics, inc to commercialize his Northstar research project.

Before joining MIT, Tim was an Assistant Professor at Brown University, spent time at Google Research, and was a PostDoc in the AMPLab at UC Berkeley after he had earned his PhD from ETH Zurich. Tim is a 2017 Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow in computer science and received several awards including the VLDB Early Career Research Contribution Award, the VMware Systems Research Award, the university-wide Early Career Research Achievement Award at Brown University, an NSF CAREER Award, as well as several best paper and demo awards at VLDB and ICDE.

Tim is a regular keynote speaker at academic and industry conferences and workshops. He served on over 30 program committees of various database, data mining, systems, visualization, and crowdsourcing conferences and was the program chair at 6 conference tracks/workshops, including the co-chair of SIGMOD 2016 and 2019 - the largest database conference. Tim is on the advisory board of the NSF Northeast Big Data Hub, was an associate editor of the Data Engineering Bulletin, and served as an expert witness in a major legal case.

Current Research Interests

• ML-enhanced data structures and algorithms
• Systems for interactive data exploration and model building
• Infrastructure for rack-scale analytics and machine learning
• Transaction processing over high-speed networks
• Hybrid human-machine data management systems

Awards

• 2018 VLDB Early Career Research Contribution Award
• 2017 VMware Systems Research Award
• 2017 Early Career Research Achievement Award from Brown University
• 2017 Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow in Computer Science
• 2017 VMware Early Career Faculty Grant
• 2016 ACM TODS - Best of SIGMOD invitation
• 2015 Google Research Award
• 2015 NSF Career award
• 2015 AFOSR Young Investigator Research Award
• 2015 Honorable Mention for TCDE Early Career Award
• 2015 VLDB Best Demo Award
• 2015 Robotics Science and Systems (AAAI-RSS) Blue Sky Award
• 2013 ICDE Best Paper Award
• 2011 VLDB Best Demo Award
• 2010 Prospective Researcher Fellowship, Swiss National Science Foundation.
• 2008 ACM TODS - Best of SIGMOD invitation
• 2006 DAAD Short-Term Scholarship , DAAD, Germany
• 2005 School of Information Technology Scholarship for outstanding achievements, University of Sydney, Australia
• 2005 Siemens Prize for Solving an Industry Problem in Research Project Work for the master thesis, University of Sydney