Aaron Elmore Promoted to Associate Professor at UChicago Computer Science
Aaron Elmore, a researcher who builds data systems for discovery, compression, and efficiency in the age of massive data, has received promotion to associate professor at UChicago CS.
Elmore joined UChicago in 2015 after receiving his Ph.D. from the University of California, Santa Barbara and a postdoctoral position at MIT. But the journey to Chicago was full circle for Elmore, who received an M.S. in computer science from UChicago and grew up in the western suburbs of Chicagoland.
During his time with the department, he has launched multiple projects in data compression, data discovery and organization for data repositories, systems for machine learning, and resource-efficient database systems. Earlier this year, he received an NSF CAREER award for developing intermittent query processing (IQP), an approach that helps database owners balance resource use, cost, and speed.
The work has involved several collaborations within and outside of the department, including with Michael Franklin, Sanjay Krishnan, Blase Ur, Kyle Chard, and Andrew Chien of UChicago CS, as well as Aditya Parameswaran of UC Berkeley and Silu Huang of Microsoft Research.
“UChicago has been an amazing and supportive environment. All of my colleagues have been incredibly supportive and the University does all that it can to support junior faculty,” Elmore said. “The CERES center was another great resource that helped support students and engage industry partners, which helped shape some of my research directions.”
Elmore also credits his students and postdocs, including Dixin Tang, Hao Jiang, Zehcao Shang, Chunwei Liu, John Paparrizos, Suhail Rehman, Will Brackenbury, Rui Liu, and many MS and undergraduate students, with contributing hard work and ideas to his research agenda. Graduating students from Elmore’s group have gone on to postdoctoral positions at UC Berkeley and Harvard.
As a teacher, Elmore leads classes including Introduction to Database Systems (co-taught with Raul Castro Fernandez) and Databases for Public Policy, as well as a Databases course for the Masters Program in Computer Science.
“Students at UChicago are a pleasure to teach here, and it really makes the job rewarding,” Elmore said. “And as always, my family is supportive of making such a hectic and demanding job possible.”
