Welcome to the Home of the Penn Database Group!

As one of the top database research groups in the world, the Penn Database Group has made many fundamental contributions to the field — particularly in areas relating to scientific data management, Web data management, distributed data sharing, data provenance, and machine learning systems. Our research spans from theory to systems, AI, and applications, and it connects to other research areas within Penn’s CIS Department (such as machine learningprogramming languageslogic and computation, computer networks, distributed systems, and approximation algorithms). Within the University, we also collaborate frequently with the Institute for Biomedical Informatics, the Center for Neuroengineering and Therapeutics, the ASSET Center, and the Warren Center for Network and Data Science. Our alumni are faculty in universities like U Washington, U Edinburgh, Duke U, IIS-Bangalore, and more; researchers with companies like Facebook-Meta, Amazon Web Services, and Google; and engineers all across tech.

Frequent Collaborators

Our group collaborates widely, within CIS and across campus!
Rajeev Alur

Rajeev Alur

Formal Methods, Programming Languages, Cyber-Physical Systems
Sebastian Angel

Sebastian Angel

Distributed Systems, Security
Sampath Kannan

Sampath Kannan

Algorithms, Complexity
Sanjeev Khanna

Sanjeev Khanna

Algorithms, Complexity
Brian Litt

Brian Litt

Neuroscience, implantable devices
Vincent Liu

Vincent Liu

Distributed Systems, Networking
Mayur Naik

Mayur Naik

Programming Languages, Machine Learning
Dan Roth

Dan Roth

Natural Language Processing, Machine Learning
Joost Wagenaar

Joost Wagenaar

Biostatistics, Epidemiology, and Informatics

DB News

Penn DB Group @ VLDB ’23

The Penn Database Group recently returned from VLDB in lovely Vancouver! Penn students, faculty, and collaborators presented three research papers and two workshop papers at the conference. Ph.D. student Chenyuan Wu (supervisor: Boon Thau Loo) Read more…

Congratulations to Yi Zhang!

Congratulations to Yi Zhang (advised by Zack Ives and Dan Roth) on successfully defending his dissertation, Extending Provenance for Understanding Claims and Data Analyses! Yi will be joining Amazon Web Services in Fall 2022.

Congratulations to Qizhen Zhang!

Congratulations to Qizhen Zhang (and his advisors Vincent Liu and Boon Thau Loo) for successfully defending his thesis, Hyperscale Data Processing with Network-centric Designs! Qizhen will be joining the University of Toronto Computer Science Department Read more…