Department alumnus Maximilian Schleich receives Honourable Mention for the 2021 SIGMOD Jim Gray Doctoral Dissertation Award

Department alumnus Maximilian Schleich was awarded an Honourable Mention for the 2021 SIGMOD Jim Gray Doctoral Dissertation Award for his DPhil dissertation entitled 'Structure-Aware Learning over Multi-Relational Databases'. The award recognizes excellent research by doctoral candidates in the database field.

The dissertation studies the problem of learning models over multi-relational databases. Maximilian proposes a novel approach that tightly integrates data management and machine learning tasks in the end-to-end learning pipeline. This integrated solution has runtime guarantees that can be asymptotically lower than mainstream solutions. In practice, this asymptotic gap translates into orders of magnitude performance improvements over state-of-the-art systems such as TensorFlow and scikit-learn. A link to the dissertation can be found here.

Maximilian is currently a Postdoctoral Scholar in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington. Previously, Maximilian received both an MSc and his DPhil (PhD) in the Department of Computer Science. In Oxford, he was part of the FDB research group led by Prof Dan Olteanu.