Ashraf Aboulnaga

Research

• Relational deep learning.
• Graph neural networks.
• Infrastructure for data agents.

• Fatima Farooq
• Fahim Shahriar Khan
• Abdalla Mohamed
• Humera Sabir

• Talha Tahmid, Humera Sabir, and Ashraf Aboulnaga.
  From Transport to Grounding: Designing MCP Connectors for Reliable SPARQL Querying by LLMs.
  International Workshop on Tabular Data Analysis (TaDA '26), Boston, Massachusetts, USA, September 2026.
  Publisher's version
• Fahim Shahriar Khan and Ashraf Aboulnaga.
  MetaSieve: Faster Relational Deep Learning through SQL-Based Metapath Selection.
  Technical Report arXiv:2608.25903, Computing Research Repository (CoRR), August 2026.
  Publisher's version
• Waleed Afandi, Hussein Abdallah, Ashraf Aboulnaga, and Essam Mansour.
  An LLM-Guided Query-Aware Inference System for GNN Models on Large Knowledge Graphs.
  IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE '26), Montreal, Canada, pages 1675-1688, May 2026.
  Publisher's version
• Humera Sabir, Fatima Farooq, and Ashraf Aboulnaga.
  gHAWK: Local and Global Structure Encoding for Scalable Training of Graph Neural Networks on Knowledge Graphs.
  Technical Report arXiv:2512.08274, Computing Research Repository (CoRR), December 2025.
  Publisher's version
• Fahim Shahriar Khan and Ashraf Aboulnaga.
  A Vision for SQL-Based Relational Deep Learning.
  International Workshop on Tabular Data Analysis (TaDA '25), London, United Kingdom, 11 pages, September 2025.
  Publisher's version
• Yifei Yang, Xiangyao Yu, Marco Serafini, Ashraf Aboulnaga, and Michael Stonebraker.
  FlexpushdownDB: Rethinking Computation Pushdown for Cloud OLAP DBMSs.
  The VLDB Journal (VLDBJ), volume 33, number 5, pages 1643-1670, September 2024.
  Publisher's version
• Chaoyi Ruan, Yingqiang Zhang, Chao Bi, Xiaosong Ma, Hao Chen, Feifei Li, Cheng Li, Ashraf Aboulnaga, and Xinjun Yang, Yinlong Xu.
  Persistent Memory Disaggregation for Cloud-Native Relational Databases.
  Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems (ASPLOS '23), Volume 3, Vancouver, Canada, pages 498-512, March 2023.
  Publisher's version
• Ghadeer Abuoda, Saravanan Thirumuruganathan, and Ashraf Aboulnaga.
  Accelerating Entity Lookups in Knowledge Graphs Through Embeddings.
  IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE '22), Virtual Conference, pages 1111-1123, May 2022.
  Publisher's version
• Aisha Mohamed, Ghadeer Abuoda, Abdurrahman Ghanem, Zoi Kaoudi, and Ashraf Aboulnaga.
  RDFFrames: Knowledge Graph Access for Machine Learning Tools.
  The VLDB Journal (VLDBJ), volume 31, number 2, pages 321-346, March 2022.
  Publisher's version
  • Special issue on big graph data management and processing.
• Aisha Mohamed, Shameem A. Parambath, Zoi Kaoudi, and Ashraf Aboulnaga.
  Popularity Agnostic Evaluation of Knowledge Graph Embeddings.
  Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI '20), Virtual Conference, pages 1059-1068, August 2020.
  Publisher's version
• Ghadeer Abuoda, Gianmarco De Francisci Morales, and Ashraf Aboulnaga.
  Link Prediction via Higher-Order Motif Features.
  European Conference on Machine Learning and Knowledge Discovery in Databases (ECML/PKDD '19), Würzburg, Germany, pages 412-429, September, 2019.
  Publisher's version
• Junjay Tan, Thanaa Ghanem, Matthew Perron, Xiangyao Yu, Michael Stonebraker, David J. DeWitt, Marco Serafini, Ashraf Aboulnaga, and Tim Kraska.
  Choosing a Cloud DBMS: Architectures and Tradeoffs.
  Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment (PVLDB), volume 12, number 12, pages 2170-2182, August 2019.
  Presented at the International Conference on Very Large Data Bases (VLDB '19), Los Angeles, California, USA, August 2019.
  Publisher's version
• Carlos H. C. Teixeira, Alexandre J. Fonseca, Marco Serafini, Georgos Siganos, Mohammed J. Zaki, and Ashraf Aboulnaga.
  Arabesque: A System for Distributed Graph Mining.
  Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP '15), Monterey, California, USA, pages 425-440, October 2015.
  Publisher's version
• Rebecca Taft, Essam Mansour, Marco Serafini, Jennie Duggan, Aaron J. Elmore, Ashraf Aboulnaga, Andrew Pavlo, and Michael Stonebraker.
  E-Store: Fine-Grained Elastic Partitioning for Distributed Transaction Processing.
  Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment (PVLDB), volume 8, number 3, pages 245-256, November 2014.
  Presented at the International Conference on Very Large Data Bases (VLDB '15), Kohala Coast, Hawaii, USA, August 2015.
  Publisher's version
• Ahmed El-Roby and Ashraf Aboulnaga.
  ALEX: Automatic Link Exploration in Linked Data.
  ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of Data (SIGMOD '15), Melbourne, Australia, pages 1839-1853, June 2015.
  Publisher's version
• Jingen Xiang, Cong Guo, and Ashraf Aboulnaga.
  Scalable Maximum Clique Computation Using MapReduce.
  IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE '13), Brisbane, Australia, pages 74-85, April 2013.
  Publisher's version
• Iman Elghandour and Ashraf Aboulnaga.
  ReStore: Reusing Results of MapReduce Jobs.
  Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment (PVLDB), volume 5, number 6, pages 586-597, February 2012.
  Presented at the International Conference on Very Large Data Bases (VLDB '12), Istanbul, Turkey, August 2012.
  Publisher's version
• Ahmed A. Soror, Umar Farooq Minhas, Ashraf Aboulnaga, Kenneth Salem, Peter Kokosielis, and Sunil Kamath.
  Automatic Virtual Machine Configuration for Database Workloads.
  ACM Transactions on Database Systems (TODS), volume 35, number 1, article 7 (47 pages), February 2010.
  Publisher's version
  • Extended version of SIGMOD '08 paper. Special issue for the best papers of SIGMOD '08.
• Ashraf Aboulnaga, Alaa R. Alameldeen, and Jeffrey F. Naughton.
  Estimating the Selectivity of XML Path Expressions for Internet Scale Applications.
  International Conference on Very Large Data Bases (VLDB '01), Rome, Italy, pages 591-600, September 2001.
  Publisher's version

• CSE 3330 - Database Systems and File Structures
  • Fall 2026
  • Spring 2026
• CSE 6331 - Advanced Topics in Database Systems (Topic: Data Infrastructure for Machine Learning)
  • Spring 2026

• Workshop Co-chair (with Tilmann Rabl) at the ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of Data (SIGMOD), 2028.
• Associate Editor of the Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment (PVLDB), volume 20, 2026-2027.
  Papers published in this volume of PVLDB were presented at the International Conference on Very Large Databases (VLDB), 2027.
• Senior Program Committee Member of the IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE), 2027.
• Associate Editor of the Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment (PVLDB), volume 19, 2025-2026.
  Papers published in this volume of PVLDB were presented at the International Conference on Very Large Databases (VLDB), 2026. (Distinguished Associate Editor Award)
• Associate Editor of the ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of Data (SIGMOD), 2026.
• Area Chair in the Research Program Committee of the IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE), 2026.
• Associate Editor of the ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of Data (SIGMOD), 2025. (Distinguished Associate Editor Award, Best Paper Selection Committee.)
• Area Chair in the Research Program Committee of the IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE), 2025.
• Senior Program Committee Member of the Conference on Extending Database Technology (EDBT), 2025. (Best Paper Selection Committee.)
• Associate Editor of the Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment (PVLDB), volume 17, 2023-2024.
  Papers published in this volume of PVLDB were presented at the International Conference on Very Large Databases (VLDB), 2024.
• Associate Editor of the ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of Data (SIGMOD), 2024. (Distinguished Associate Editor Award, Best Paper Selection Committee.)
• Industry and Applications Track Program Committee Co-Chair (with Peter Boncz and Fatma Özcan) of the IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE), 2024.
• Senior Program Committee Member of the Conference on Extending Database Technology (EDBT), 2024.
• Industrial Track Program Committee Co-Chair (with Avrilia Floratou) of the ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of Data (SIGMOD), 2022.
• Associate Editor of the Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment (PVLDB), volume 14, 2020-2021.
  Papers published in this volume of PVLDB were presented at the International Conference on Very Large Databases (VLDB), 2021.
• Program committee member of:
  • ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of Data, 2027. (Industrial Track)
  • Conference on Extending Database Technology (EDBT), 2027.
  • ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of Data, 2026.
  • ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of Data, 2026. (Industrial Track)
  • Conference on Extending Database Technology (EDBT), 2026.
  • IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE), 2024.
  • Workshop on Serverless Data Analytics (SDA), 2023.
  • International Conference on Very Large Databases (VLDB), 2023.
  • ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of Data, 2023.
  • ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of Data, 2023. (Industrial Track, Best Paper Selection Committee)
  • Conference on Extending Database Technology (EDBT), 2023.
  • Conference on Extending Database Technology (EDBT), 2021.