Alon Halevy

Dr. Halevy is currently a director at Facebook AI, in Menlo Park, California. From 2015 until 2018, Dr. Halevy was the CEO of Megagon Labs, an AI research lab conducting research on technology for well-being, conversational interfaces, and more generally, the intersection between NLP and data management. From 2005 to 2015, Alon headed the Structured Data Group at Google Research. Prior to that, he was a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Washington, where he founded the Database Research Group. From 1993 to 1997 he was a Principal Member of Technical Staff at AT&T Bell Laboratories (later AT&T Laboratories). He received his Ph.D in Computer Science from Stanford University in 1993, and his Bachelors degree in Computer Science and Mathematics from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem in 1988.

Dr. Halevy's research interests are in data integration, structured-data on the Web, semantic heterogeneity, personal information management, management of XML data, web-site management, peer-data management systems, query optimization, database theory, knowledge representation, and more generally, the intersection between Database and AI technologies. His research developed several systems, such as the Information Manifold data integration system, the Strudel web-site management system, the LSD schema matching system, the Tukwila XML data integration system. He was also a co-developer of XML-QL, which later contributed to the development of XQuery standard for querying XML data. His group at Google developed Google Fusion Tables, a collaborative tool for data management and visualization in the cloud.

In 1999, Dr. Halevy co-founded Nimble Technology, one of the first companies in the Enterprise Information Integration space (acquired by Actuate in 2003). In 2004, Dr. Halevy founded Transformic Inc., a company that created search engines for the deep web, content residing in databases behind web forms (acquired by Google in 2005).

Dr. Halevy is a Fellow of the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM). He was a Sloan Fellow (1999-2000), and received the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) in 2000. The paper he co-authored on the Information Manifold System received the VLDB 2006 Test of Time Award, and the paper he co-authored on WebTables received the VLDB 2018 Test of Time Award. The paper he co-authored on the Piazza Peer-to-Peer Data Management System received the ICDE 2013 Test-of-Time Award. He served on the Board of Trustees of the VLDB Endowment, the editorial board of the VLDB Journal, as an associate editor and advisor for the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research and on the editorial board of ACM Transactions on Internet Technology. He served as the program chair for the ACM SIGMOD 2003 Conference. He has given over 50 keynotes at top conferences, and Distinguished Lectures at several Computer Science Departments.