Mahdi Esmailoghli

I am a postdoctoral researcher in the Data Systems Group at the University of Waterloo, working with Renée J. Miller. Before Waterloo I was a postdoc at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin with Matthias Weidlich, and I completed my Ph.D. (summa cum laude) at TU Berlin under Ziawasch Abedjan.

I work on data discovery and integration over large, heterogeneous data lakes — how to find the right tables among millions, join and union them, and reason about how their content changes over time. Recently I have been building systems for temporally-valid data discovery and for helping scientists design data-analysis workflows.

Data discovery · Data lakes · Table & dataset search · Data integration · Data preparation · Temporal data · Scientific workflows

News

• Jun 2026Invited talk on FlowPilot at HILDA @ SIGMOD 2026, Bangalore.
• 2026FlowPilot accepted at SIGMOD 2026; Every Data Lake Has a Past at DOLAP 2026.
• May 2026Started as a postdoctoral researcher in Renée J. Miller's Data Systems Group at the University of Waterloo.
• 2026Awarded a DAAD PPP Joint Research Cooperation Grant as Principal Investigator (2026–2027).

Publications

• Every Data Lake Has a Past: Analytical Exploration of Wikipedia History as a Temporal Data Lake
  Mahdi Esmailoghli, Steven Purtzel, Roee Shraga, Renée J. Miller, Matthias Weidlich
  DOLAP 2026
  PDF
• The Past Still Matters: A Temporally-Valid Data Discovery System
  Mahdi Esmailoghli, Matthias Weidlich
  Preprint, 2026 · under submission
  arXiv
• FlowPilot: A Suggestion System for Designing Scientific Workflows
  Mahdi Esmailoghli, Matthias Weidlich
  SIGMOD 2026
  PDF
• Data Discovery in Data Lakes: Operations, Indexes, Systems
  Ziawasch Abedjan, Mahdi Esmailoghli, Sainyam Galhotra
  ICDE 2026 · tutorial
• Data Discovery in Data Lakes: Operations, Indexes, Systems
  Ziawasch Abedjan, Mahdi Esmailoghli, Sainyam Galhotra
  PVLDB 2025 · tutorial
  PDF
• Blend: A Unified Data Discovery System
  Mahdi Esmailoghli, Christoph Schnell, Renée J. Miller, Ziawasch Abedjan
  ICDE 2025
  PDF
• Demonstrating MATE and COCOA for Data Discovery
  Jannis Becktepe, Mahdi Esmailoghli, Maximilian Koch, Ziawasch Abedjan
  SIGMOD 2023 · demonstration
  PDF
• Duplicate Table Discovery with Xash
  Maximilian Koch, Mahdi Esmailoghli, Sören Auer, Ziawasch Abedjan
  BTW 2023
  PDF
• MATE: Multi-Attribute Table Extraction
  Mahdi Esmailoghli, Jorge-Arnulfo Quiané-Ruiz, Ziawasch Abedjan
  PVLDB 2022
  PDF Slides Poster Video Code
• COCOA: Correlation Coefficient-Aware Data Augmentation
  Mahdi Esmailoghli, Jorge-Arnulfo Quiané-Ruiz, Ziawasch Abedjan
  EDBT 2021
  PDF Slides Video Code
• Combining Programming-by-Example with Transformation Discovery from Large Databases
  Aslihan Özmen, Mahdi Esmailoghli, Ziawasch Abedjan
  BTW 2021
  PDF
• CAFE: Constraint-Aware Feature Extraction from Large Databases
  Mahdi Esmailoghli, Ziawasch Abedjan
  CIDR 2020
  PDF
• Particulate Matter Matters — The Data Science Challenge @ BTW 2019
  Holger J. Meyer, Hannes Grunert, Tim Waizenegger, Lucas Woltmann, Claudio Hartmann, Wolfgang Lehner, Mahdi Esmailoghli, et al.
  Datenbank-Spektrum 2019
  PDF Slides

Invited Talks

• FlowPilot: A Suggestion System for Designing Scientific Workflows HILDA @ SIGMOD 2026, Bangalore · Jun 2026
• Lost in a Haystack of Data Lakes: Searching for the Needle University of Waterloo & York University, Toronto · Sep 2025
• A Unified Data Discovery System Hasso Plattner Institute (HPI), Potsdam · May 2024
• MATE: Multi-Attribute Table Extraction TaDA @ VLDB 2023, Vancouver · Northeastern University (Khoury), 2023

Teaching & Mentoring

• Programming Lab: Data Systems TU Berlin · SS 2024
• Big-Data Technologies Leibniz University Hannover · WS 2022, WS 2023
• Data Science Foundation Leibniz University Hannover · SS 2022, SS 2023
• Advanced Topics in Database Systems Leibniz University Hannover · SS & WS 2021
• Data Science 1: Essentials of Data Programming TU Berlin · WS 2019, SS 2020
• Data Science Application TU Berlin · SS 2019, SS 2020
• Data Intensive Computing Amirkabir University of Technology · 2017

Co-supervised 15+ B.Sc. and M.Sc. theses in data integration and data discovery, two of which led to peer-reviewed papers.

Awards & Funding

• DAAD PPP Joint Research Cooperation Grant — Principal Investigator 2026–2027, €34,499 · “Data Discovery in the Presence of Temporal Drifts”
• Ph.D. awarded summa cum laude (highest honour) TU Berlin · 2024
• Distinguished Referee CIKM 2023
• GI Data Science Challenge, 1st Prize BTW 2023 (Dresden) & BTW 2019 (Rostock)
• Ranked #4, 19th National Computer Olympiad of Iran 2014

Academic Service

• Program Committee — SIGMOD 2026, VLDB 2026, ICDE 2025, CIKM 2024, CIKM 2023, TaDA 2026
• Journal Reviewer — Information Systems (2025)
• W3 professorship hiring committee (Software Quality), Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
• Member of three Ph.D. examination committees and a thesis advisory committee, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin

Contact

mahdi.esmailoghli@uwaterloo.ca
Data Systems Group, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, ON, Canada