Ihab Francis Ilyas (born May 13, 1973) is a computer scientist who works in

data science Data science is an interdisciplinary academic field that uses statistics, scientific computing, scientific methods, processing, scientific visualization, algorithms and systems to extract or extrapolate knowledge from potentially noisy, stru ...

. He is currently a professor of

computer science Computer science is the study of computation, information, and automation. Computer science spans Theoretical computer science, theoretical disciplines (such as algorithms, theory of computation, and information theory) to Applied science, ...

in the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science at the

University of Waterloo The University of Waterloo (UWaterloo, UW, or Waterloo) is a Public university, public research university located in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. The main campus is on of land adjacent to uptown Waterloo and Waterloo Park. The university also op ...

. He also led the Knowledge Platform team at

Apple Inc. Apple Inc. is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Cupertino, California, in Silicon Valley. It is best known for its consumer electronics, software, and services. Founded in 1976 as Apple Comput ...

Ihab is the holder of the Thomson Reuters-NSERC Industrial Research Chair in Data Cleaning at the University of Waterloo. Ilyas co-founded Tamr Inc., a start-up focusing on large-scale data integration and cleaning, with Andy Palmer and

Michael Stonebraker Michael Ralph Stonebraker (born October 11, 1943) is an American computer scientist specializing in database, database systems. Through a series of academic prototypes and commercial startups, Stonebraker's research and products are central to m ...

, a

Turing Award The ACM A. M. Turing Award is an annual prize given by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) for contributions of lasting and major technical importance to computer science. It is generally recognized as the highest distinction in the fi ...

winner. Ilyas co-founded and was the CEO of Inductiv Inc., an

artificial intelligence Artificial intelligence (AI) is the capability of computer, computational systems to perform tasks typically associated with human intelligence, such as learning, reasoning, problem-solving, perception, and decision-making. It is a field of re ...

start-up that uses

machine learning Machine learning (ML) is a field of study in artificial intelligence concerned with the development and study of Computational statistics, statistical algorithms that can learn from data and generalise to unseen data, and thus perform Task ( ...

to automate the task of identifying and correcting errors in data, which he co-founded with Theodoros Rekatsinas at the

University of Wisconsin-Madison A university () is an institution of tertiary education and research which awards academic degrees in several academic disciplines. ''University'' is derived from the Latin phrase , which roughly means "community of teachers and scholars". Uni ...

and

Christopher Ré Christopher Ré is an American computer scientist. He is currently employed by Stanford University, where he is a full professor. He was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 2015. Ré specializes in big data analysis. He co-founded Lattice.io, a dat ...

Stanford University Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University, is a Private university, private research university in Stanford, California, United States. It was founded in 1885 by railroad magnate Leland Stanford (the eighth ...

. Inductiv was acquired by

in May 2020.

Education and career

Ilyas was born and raised in

Alexandria, Egypt Alexandria ( ; ) is the List of cities and towns in Egypt#Largest cities, second largest city in Egypt and the List of coastal settlements of the Mediterranean Sea, largest city on the Mediterranean coast. It lies at the western edge of the Nile ...

. After completing bachelor's and master's degrees at

Alexandria University Alexandria University () is a public university in Alexandria, Egypt. It was established in 1938 as a satellite of Fouad University (the name of which was later changed to Cairo University), becoming an independent entity in 1942. It was known as ...

in 1995 and 1999, respectively, he earned a PhD at

Purdue University Purdue University is a Public university#United States, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in West Lafayette, Indiana, United States, and the flagship campus of the Purdue University system. The university was founded ...

in 2004 under the supervision of Walid Aref and Ahmed K. Elmagarmid. After his doctoral studies, Ilyas accepted a position in 2004 as a tenure-track professor at the University of Waterloo's David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science. Research contributions Ilyas is best known for the development of database systems and data science, with emphasis on data quality, data cleaning, managing uncertain data, machine learning for data curation, and rank-aware query processing. Since 2009, he has focused research on data quality and the technical challenges in building data-cleaning systems. He and his research group introduced novel practical algorithms and system prototypes, which circumvent limitations of previous data-cleaning solutions that either focus narrowly on single types of data errors or ignore real-life considerations that prevent their adoption. With Theodoros Rekatsinas,

, and Xu Chu, he introduced HoloClean, an open-source statistical inference engine to impute, clean and enrich data. Awards and honours Ilyas received a Government of Ontario Early Researcher Award in 2008, a provincial program that funds new leading researchers at publicly funded Ontario universities to build a research team. He was named an IBM Canada Advanced Studies Fellow from 2006 to 2010. Ilyas held a Cheriton Faculty Fellowship at the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science from 2013 to 2016 and he received the Google Faculty Award in 2014. He was named an ACM Distinguished Scientist in 2014, and an

ACM Fellow ACM Fellowship is an award and fellowship that recognises outstanding members of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). The title of ACM Fellow A fellow is a title and form of address for distinguished, learned, or skilled individuals ...

in 2020 for his contributions to data cleaning and data integration. He was also named

IEEE Fellow , the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) is an American 501(c)(3) public charity professional organization for electrical engineering, electronics engineering, and ot ...

in 2022 for his contributions in data cleaning, data integration and rank-aware query processing and a Fellow of the

Royal Society of Canada The Royal Society of Canada (RSC; , SRC), also known as the Academies of Arts, Humanities, and Sciences of Canada (French: ''Académies des arts, des lettres et des sciences du Canada''), is the senior national, bilingual council of distinguishe ...

in 2024. In 2024, he also received the 2024 C.C. Gotlieb Computer Award from IEEE Canada in recognition of his contributions to building large-scale machine learning systems for data integration, data cleaning, and knowledge construction. Since 2018, Ilyas has held the Thomson Reuters-NSERC Industrial Research Chair in Data Cleaning. In 2020, he was named a faculty affiliate at the Vector Institute. Service Ilyas was elected a member of Board of Trustees of the Very Large Data Bases Endowment in 2016 and the Vice Chair of the ACM Special Interest Group on Data Management (SIGMOD) in 2017.

References

External links

* * {{DEFAULTSORT:Ilyas, Ihab Egyptian computer scientists Canadian computer scientists Egyptian emigrants to Canada Academic staff of the University of Waterloo Purdue University alumni Alexandria University alumni Living people 1973 births People from Alexandria Database researchers