Dr. Davood Rafiei

Biography

Davood Rafiei completed his undergraduate studies at Sharif University of Technology in Computer Engineering and went on to earn his M.Sc. in Computer Science from the University of Waterloo, followed by a Ph.D. in Computer Science at the University of Toronto. He joined the University of Alberta in 2000 and is a Professor in the Department of Computing Science. He is a member of the Database Systems Research Group and has served on program committees for prominent database conferences including SIGMOD and VLDB. His research interests are primarily in the area of databases and the Web, with a focus on integrating natural language text and relational data, Web information retrieval, and similarity queries. Additionally, he has held visiting scientist positions at Google in 2007-2008, and visiting professor roles at both Kyoto University in 2014 and the University of Paris (Descartes) in 2015. He has co-authored multiple books on natural language interfaces for databases, and his current research examines the integration of large language models to address complex challenges in data integration and information retrieval.

Research Interests