Chen Li
Professor
Department of Computer Science
2086 Donald Bren Hall, University of California, Irvine, CA 92697-3435
chenli AT ics DOT uci DOT edu, Office: 949-824-9470
Chen Li is a professor in the Department of Computer Science at UC Irvine. He received his Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from Stanford University, and his M.S. and B.S. in Computer Science from Tsinghua University, China, respectively. He was a recipient of an NSF CAREER award and several test-of-time publication awards, a part-time visiting research scientist at Google, PC co-chair of VLDB 2015, an ACM distinguished member, and an IEEE fellow. Since January 2020, he’s the treasurer and a board member of the VLDB Endowment. From July 2020 to June 2024, he was the Faculty Director of the ICS Master of Computer Science Program. He was a co-founder and CTO of a startup to commercialize his research.
Research
My research interests are in the field of data management, including data-intensive computing, databases, query processing and optimization, machine learning-based systems, data science, search, visualization. My current focus is building open-source systems for big data management, data science, and AI/ML. My PhD thesis at Stanford was on data integration, with an emphasis on both theoretical and practical aspects. My recent research, especially after spending a few quarters at Google and a few years doing a startup as its founder and CTO, has a strong preference on engineering and open source system building. I believe “Computer Science” is a “Science” to support great engineering, and we need to build systems to stay relevant in this fast-paced IT era. I was a co-PI of the Apache AsterixDB project. Since 2016, our team has been developing the Texera open-source system to support cloud-based collaborative data science, AI, and ML using workflows. Learn More …
Services
SIGMOD 2027 (General co-chair), VLDB Endowment 2020 – now (Treasurer and Board Member), ICDE Steering Committee (2024 – now), SIGMOD 2026 (PC member), SIGMOD 2025 (PC member), VLDB 2024 Reproducibility (PC member), VLDB 2023 (PC member), ICDE 2023 (General Chair), SIGMOD 2022 (PC member), VLDB 2021 (Associate Editor, Industrial co-Chair), ICDE 2021 (PC member), IEEE Big Data 2019 (Tutorial co-Chair), TKDE 2018-2022 (Associate Editor), VLDB 2015 (PC co-Chair).
News
- (8/6/25) Yicong has successfully defined his thesis titled “UDF-Centric Dataflow Systems for Supporting User-defined Functions in Collaborative and Interactive Data Science, AI, and ML.” Congratulations, Dr. Huang!
- (8/6/25) Our Texera codebase has been officially denoted to the Apache Software Foundation. The GitHub name has changed from https://github.com/Texera/texera to https://github.com/apache/texera.
- (7/25) Yicong received a UC Irvine 2025 Most Promising Future Faculty Award. The award will be celebrated on the UCI Teach Day on September 18th, 2025. Congratulations!
- (7/21/2025 – 7/23/2025) Together with UCLA and UCSD colleagues, we used the Texera platform to teach 17 biology students data science, AI, and ML as part of a dkNet data science bootcamp. It’s the first we deployed the whole system on AWS with auto-scaling!
- (7/21/2025) Our team used the Texera platform to teach 32 middle school students data science, AI, and ML. Check the photos!
- (7/11/2025) Together with the team of Prof. Wei Wang from UCLA, we have successfully organized the Data Science For All 2025 program at UCI. 33 high-school and college students used Texera to learn data science, AI, and ML.
- (6/2025) Gave a talk at TU Berlin titled “Texera: An Open-Source System for Cloud-Based Collaborative Data Science and AI/ML Using Workflows” hosted by Prof. Odej Kao.
- (6/2025) Attended the UCI commencement to hood PhD students Yicong Huang and Shengquan Ni. Congratulations!
- (5/21/2025) My team gave a presentation at an ACM OC Meetup event.
- (5/6/2025) Our paper titled “Responsive State Retrieval in Pipelined Executions of Dataflows” was accepted by the HILDA workshop together with the ACM SIGMOD 2025 conference.
- (5/6/2025) Shengquan Ni successfully defended his PhD thesis. He will join Google after graduation. Congratulations!
- (4/2025) Yicong plans to join Databricks in 2025 then UMass Amherst as a Tenure-Track Assistant Professor in 2027. Congratulations!
- (4/7/2025) Our team has a major Texera release 1.0.0 with the instructions to install the system on a single machine using Docker.
- (4/2/2025) Our Texera project has been officially accepted by the Apache Incubator!
- (4/1/2025) We plan to organize the “Data Science for All (DS4ALL)” summer program for the third year (together with UCLA) from July 7 to July 11, 2025. We will again use Texera to teach high-school students data science, AI, and ML.
- (3/24/2025) I will participate and teach in the 2025 dkNET Summer of Data Student Program.
- (3/16/2025) Here’s our Texera incubation proposal to the Apache Software Foundation currently under community review.
- (2/25) Jiadong and I attended the DSE-K12 conference from February 17-19 in San Antonio, TX, and presented the paper titled: “DS4ALL: Teaching High-School Students Data Science and AI/ML Using the Texera Workflow Platform as a Service.” Here’s a photo at the conference.
- (1/25) Please check our new texera.io web site! 🙂
- (1/25) In this quarter, for the first time, I am teaching two courses, CS 122B “Projects in Databases and Web Applications” and CS 122C/222 “Principles of Data Management”.
- Past News