Mahdi Esmailoghli

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

• Sep 2026New book, Data Discovery in Data Lakes, forthcoming from Springer Nature, with Ziawasch Abedjan and Sainyam Galhotra.
• Aug 2026Co-teaching a new graduate course, CS 738: Data Engineering for Data Science, at the University of Waterloo (Fall 2026).
• 2026FlowPilot selected as one of the best papers of SIGMOD 2026 and invited for an extended submission to ACM TODS.
• Jun 2026Invited talk on FlowPilot at HILDA @ SIGMOD 2026, Bangalore.
• 2026FlowPilot accepted at SIGMOD 2026.
• 2026Every Data Lake Has a Past accepted at DOLAP 2026.
• 2026Awarded a DAAD PPP Joint Research Cooperation Grant as Principal Investigator (2026–2027).

Publications

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

• CS 738 — Data Engineering for Data Science University of Waterloo (Graduate Course, Co-Professor) · Fall 2026
• CS 848 — Advanced Topics in Databases: Data Lake and Model Lake Management University of Waterloo (with Prof. Renée J. Miller) · Summer 2026
• 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 — VLDB 2027, 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