Davood Rafiei did his undergrad work at the Sharif University of Technology, his M.Sc. at the University of Waterloo, and his Ph.D. at the University of Toronto before joining the University of Alberta, where he is now Associate Professor of Computer Science and member of the Database Systems Research Group. His areas of expertise, which span over databases and the Web, is on managing large complex data. In particular, his research interest includes natural language data management and integration, spatial analysis and mining of web content, similarity-based queries and indexing, and web information retrieval. Davood regularly serves in the program committees of major database and data mining conferences (such as SIGMOD, VLDB, KDD, ICDM, CIKM) and Web conferences (such as WWW). Davood has spent time, as a visiting scientist, at Google (Mountain View), Kyoto University, and the University of Paris Descartes.
