Saeed Fathollahzadeh

I am a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Data Intelligence Lab, part of the Data Systems Group at the Cheriton School of Computer Science at the University of Waterloo, working with Prof. Renée J. Miller. I received my Ph.D. from the Database Lab of Concordia University, supervised by Prof. Essam Mansour and Prof. Matthias Boehm (co-supervisor, TU Berlin), with whom I started my data management research at the Data Management for Data Science Laboratory (DAMSLab) prior to moving to Concordia. Before that, I was a Research Assistant at the Database Systems Group of the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano.

Interests: The purpose of my research is to study data analytics-analyzing, storing, retrieving, and manipulating large, heterogeneous datasets. I focus on systems-oriented challenges in developing software for managing and processing such data, particularly in machine learning systems. Specifically:

• Data Management: Focused on efficient processing and system automation
• ML for Data Management: Focused on automatic decomposition of operations
• Database Systems: Focused on query processing and optimization

Education

• Ph.D. [Sep. 2023 - Aug. 2026], Computer Science, Concordia University, Canada.
  Thesis: LLM-assisted Data Systems for Efficient ML Pipeline Generation and Query Optimization
  Supervisors: Prof. Essam Mansour and Prof. Matthias Boehm
• Ph.D. [2021 - Sep. 2023], Computer Science, Graz University of Technology (TU Graz), Austria.
  Supervisor: Prof. Matthias Boehm (transferred to Concordia University because of the supervisor moved to TU Berlin)
• M.Sc. [2012 - 2014], Software Engineering, Computer Engineering Department of Iran University of Science and Technology, Iran.
  Thesis: A Middleware for Distributed Processing of Complex Events
  Supervisor: Prof. Mohsen Sharifi

Working Experiences

• [September 2026 - Present], Postdoctoral Researcher, Data Intelligence Lab, Data Systems Group, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Canada.
• [September 2023 - August 2026], Research Assistant, Concordia University, Database Lab , Montreal, Canada.
• [April 2021 - September 2023], Researcher, Know-Center GmbH Research Center for Data-Driven Business & Big Data Analytics, Graz, Austria.
• [March 2020 - April 2021], Research Assistant, Database Systems Research Group at the Faculty of Computer Science of the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Bolzano, Italy.
• [Aug 2017 - March 2020], Director of Web Applications, Bimito, Iranian Insurtech, Tehran, Iran.
• [2016 - 2017], Lead Software Engineer, Bimito, Iranian Insurtech, Tehran, Iran.

Publications

• Saeed Fathollahzadeh, Essam Mansour, Matthias Boehm, ReSequel: Robust LLM-assisted Query Rewriting and Optimization using Templatization and Sampling. PVLDB 2026 (vol. 19) [paper, slides, poster, repro]
• Saeed Fathollahzadeh, Essam Mansour, Matthias Boehm, CatDB: Data-catalog-guided, LLM-based Generation of Data-centric ML Pipelines. PVLDB 2025 (vol. 18) [paper, slides, poster, repro]
• Saeed Fathollahzadeh, Essam Mansour, Matthias Boehm, Demonstrating CatDB: LLM-based Generation of Data-centric ML Pipelines. SIGMOD 2025 (Demo) [paper, slides, poster, repro]
• Saeed Fathollahzadeh, Maxwell Norfolk, Stefanos Baziotis, Xiaohan Yang, Reproducibility Report for ACM SIGMOD 2024 Paper: 'Dias: Dynamic Rewriting of Pandas Code', SIGMOD 2024 ARI [report link].
• Saeed Fathollahzadeh, Matthias Boehm, GIO: Generating Efficient Matrix and Frame Readers for Custom Data Formats by Example, SIGMOD 2023 [paper, repro, slides, poster].
• Sambasiva Rao Gangineni, Harshad Reddy Nalla, Saeed Fathollahzadeh, and Kia Teymourian, Real-Time Object Recognition from Streaming LiDAR Point Cloud Data DEBS 2019 [paper] (Grand Challenge & Audience Award).
• Saeed Fathollahzadeh, Kia Teymourian, Mohsen Sharifi, Stateful Complex Event Detection on Event Streams using Parallelization of Event Stream Aggregations and Detection Tasks, DEBS 2016 [paper].
• Saeed Fathollahzadeh, Reza Karimi, Mohsen Sharifi, Kia Teymourian, Ahmad Hasan, Adrian Paschke, Parallel Event Processing on Unbound Streams with Multi-Step Windowing, DEBS 2015 [paper].

Awards

• DEBS'19 Grand Challenge and Grand Challenge Audience Award
• 1^st Rank, Achieving the highest GPA among all university Computer Engineering Bachelor students.
• 2^nd Rank, Nationwide M.Sc. entrance exam in Computer Engineering-Computer Software of Iranian Universities (Islamic Azad University of Qazvin competitive with nearly 40,000 participants).

Service

• Program Committee PVLDB 2027
• IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering (TKDE) 2027
• ICDE 2026 (Web Chair)
• Program Committee SIGMOD Reproducibility (2025, 2024, 2023)
• External Reviewer PAKDD 2024