Kerem

PhD @uwaterloo | visiting @ucberkeley

[Aditya Parameswaran @adityagp]

As we head to the last few days of funding for the police records access project, I am proud that we continue to have real-world impact by enabling journalists and public defenders to process and make sense of large volumes of unstructured data - see the following eye-opening article from KQED.

https://t.co/bwfQIYskQM

[Kerem @keremakillioglu]

@rpradeep42 Congrats Ronak! 🎉 Best of luck at Databricks!

[Melissa Pan ✈️ ICML @melissapan]

Excited to share that MAP has been selected for ✨ICML Oral✨

We look forward to sharing the insights in the paper with the community

And much much appreciations to everyone who participated in our study ❤️ MAP won’t be possible without your contribution to open science

[Kerem @keremakillioglu]

@YimingLin0426 @NTUsg @UCBerkeley Huge congrats Yiming!! 🎉 NTU is also very special to me since I did my exchange there and really liked it. Excited for you and your new chapter!

[Yiming Lin @YimingLin0426]

Better late than never, thrilled to share that I'm joining Nanyang Technological University @NTUsg this fall as a tenure-track Nanyang Assistant Professor (NAP) in the CCDS department! Big move from California to Singapore.
The years from Irvine to @UCBerkeley have been wonderful. Huge thanks to my family, advisors (@adityagp and Sharad Mehrotra), friends, and colleagues who've been with me on this journey. I'll miss everything here.
My research focuses on building reliable & scalable AI-powered systems for complex data work. I'm looking for postdocs & RAs (Fall 2026) and PhD students (Spring 2027). Reach out or visit https://t.co/4W2tFRSdLZ and hope to connect!
#NTUsg #BerkeleyResearch

[Negar Arabzadeh @NegarEmpr]

1/ Thrilled to introduce T³: a corpus for RAG over reasoning tasks, built from thinking traces.
We show that surprisingly RAG can improve reasoning— with the right corpus.
Rag with Transformed Thinking Traces T³ gain by up to 43.9% on AIME 2025-2026.
🔗 https://t.co/9GPxKnszte 🧵

[Shreya Shankar @sh_reya]

I'm joining Carnegie Mellon's CS Department (and HCII by courtesy) as an assistant professor in Fall 2027!

I'll be recruiting PhD students next cycle. If you're interested in AI systems or human-AI collaboration, list me in your application. Stay tuned for more about my new lab!

[Kerem @keremakillioglu]

@sh_reya Congratulations Shreya!!! So well deserved 🎉 Excited to follow all the great work coming out of your new lab!

[Kerem @keremakillioglu]

💯

[Arpit Bhayani @arpit_bhayani]

With agentic slop, we are trading software reliability for shipping velocity and calling it progress. It isn't. Systems are more fragile than ever, and engineers building them no longer trust their code to hold up in real-world edge cases.

I am pro-AI, but this will backfire - big time.

[Aditya Parameswaran @adityagp]

Excited to release the Data Agent Benchmark, going beyond vanilla text2SQL/TableQA benchmarks to stress-test how models work with (and join data across) multiple database backends employing different schemas and encodings.

Turns out no models do well! Hoping this will spur research on how to make data agents practical — looking forward to your submissions to the leaderboard!

Collab. b/n @UCBEPIC and @PromptQL

[Shreya Shankar @sh_reya]

Databases are arguably the most commonly used enterprise tool, and enterprises typically have many of them. Yet no popular AI agent benchmark actually tests how well agents can query, join, and make sense of data across different databases!

So, we built DAB (Data Agent Benchmark): 54 queries, 12 datasets, 9 domains, and 4 database management systems, grounded in a formative study of real enterprise data agent workloads. The best frontier model only gets 38% pass@1 (across 50 trials). Lots of room for improvement!

[Kerem @keremakillioglu]

🚀🚀🚀

[Mayank Mishra @MayankMish98]

Introducing M²RNN: Non-Linear RNNs with Matrix-Valued States for Scalable Language Modeling

We bring back non-linear recurrence to language modeling and show it's been held back by small state sizes, not by non-linearity itself.

📄 Paper: https://t.co/AS8e2tNrRa
💻 Code: https://t.co/LMvBcI22Du
🤗 Models: https://t.co/NCmjrpNriq

[Kerem @keremakillioglu]

Hah!

Scaling up the Prime Video audio/video monitoring service and reducing costs by 90%

https://t.co/K0siYYLGY4

[University of Waterloo @UWaterloo]

Ilknur Umay, a #UWaterloo engineering postdoctoral scholar, started small to help those affected by the earthquakes in eastern #Türkiye and #Syria, her efforts have grown due to her close circle of friends and a wider and growing circle of people on campus.
📸: @redcrosscanada

[Tom Goldstein @tomgoldsteincs]

Whelp, here we are. UMD is having a training seminar for faculty on how to handle ChatGPT this semester, and whether using AI constitutes "cheating." The impact of language models on teaching will not be profound, but it will be profoundly annoying.

[Kerem @keremakillioglu]

It is always interesting to read Andy Pavlo's blog posts about databases. The latest one is no exception.

[Andy Pavlo (@andypavlo.bsky.social) @andy_pavlo]

It's time for my annual tradition! Here is my @OtterTuneAI retrospective of the last year in the world of databases. I cover DB startup funding, why #blockchain databases are stupid, new systems, and how my good friend @larryellison is saving our country: https://t.co/4q8NcQwGQz

[Kerem @keremakillioglu]

My visa has just been approved and I can finally say that I will be attending CMMRS next week 🚀🇩🇪

[Jonathan Mace @mpi_jcmace]

CS Faculty Twitter! Cornell, Maryland, and Max Planck host a 1-week summer school (CMMRS) for aspiring undergraduate and masters researchers. Free trip to Germany! Please help spread the word -- the application deadline is approaching (21st Feb) https://t.co/QzdjiGUeQT

[Tamer Özsu (mtozsu.bsky.social) @ozsu]

Congratulations to Anil for a very nice piece of work.

[Data Systems Group @ University of Waterloo @dsg_uwaterloo]

Congrats to Anil Pacaci, Angela Bonifati @ang3ela, and M. Tamer Özsu @ozsu for their ICDE paper "Evaluating Complex Queries on Streaming Graphs" on the best paper award!