Ihab Ilyas
Ihab Francis Ilyas is a computer scientist who works in data science. He is currently a professor of computer science in the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science at the University of Waterloo, where he is the first holder of the Thomson Reuters-funded Research Chair in Data Cleaning from Theory to Practice.
Ilyas co-founded Tamr Inc., a start-up focusing on large-scale data integration and cleaning, with Andy Palmer and Michael Stonebraker, a Turing Award winner. Ilyas was the CEO of Inductiv Inc., an artificial intelligence start-up that uses machine learning to automate the task of identifying and correcting errors in data, which he co-founded with Theodoros Rekatsinas at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Christopher Ré at Stanford University. Inductiv was acquired by Apple Inc. in May 2020.Career
Ilyas was born and raised in Alexandria, Egypt. After completing bachelor’s and master’s degrees at Alexandria University in 1995 and 1999, respectively, he earned a PhD at Purdue University in 2004 under the supervision of Walid Aref and Ahmed K. Elmagarmid.
After doctoral studies, Ilyas accepted a position as a tenure-track professor in computer science at the University of Waterloo. He held a Cheriton Faculty Fellowship from 2013–16, and was named an ACM Distinguished Scientist in 2014. He received Google Faculty Award in 2014 and Ontario Early Researcher Award in 2009. He was elected as a member of Board of Trustees of the Very Large Data Bases Endowment 2016 and the Vice Chair of the ACM Special Interest Group on Data Management in 2017.
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.
