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

Welcome Zijie!

The Penn Database Group is welcoming Zijie Zhao to the Ph.D. program this year! Zijie previously earned his bachelor’s degree from Tianjin University, and is joining the DB group to work on adaptive and self-tuning Read more…

Penn DB Group @ VLDB 2024

This August, VLDB 2024 will be in Guangzhou, China! Penn will again be well-represented, with 3 papers in the Research Track: In Towards Full Stack Adaptivity in Permissioned Blockchains, PhD student Chenyuan Wu, postdoc alumnus Read more…

Penn DB Group @ SIGMOD ’24

The Penn DB Group presented a number of papers at SIGMOD 2024, hosted in Santiago, Chile! Penn presented five papers (four in SIGMOD and one in aiDM). Ph.D. student Soonbo Han (advisor: Zachary Ives) presented Read more…

Penn DB Group @ NEDB ’24

This May, several members of the Penn DB group attended the Northeast Database Day hosted at BU! The group presented two posters on query optimization. Ph.D. student Jeff Tao (supervisors: Ryan Marcus and Andrew Head) Read more…