Ihab’s research focus at QCRI is Data Analytics, in particular, data quality issues, information extraction, and probabilistic processing of uncertain data.

Ihab Ilyas is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of Waterloo and VP research at Primal. He received his PhD in computer science from Purdue University, West Lafayette in 2004. He holds BS and MS degrees in computer science from Alexandria University, Egypt. He spent two summers with IBM Almaden Research Center and he is currently an IBM CAS faculty fellow since January 2006. His main research is in the area of database systems, with special interest in top-k and rank-aware query processing, managing uncertain and probabilistic databases, self-managing databases, indexing techniques, and spatial databases.

• Associate Professor: University of Waterloo, School of Computer Science, (2009 - present)
• VP-Research: Primal Fusion, Waterloo (2009 – present)
• Assistant Professor: University of Waterloo, School of Computer Science, (2004 - 2009)
• Research Assistant: Purdue University, Department of Computer Sciences, (1999 - 2004)
• Research Intern: IBM Almaden Research Center, summer 2002, and summer 2003
• Lecturer: Alexandria University, Department of Computer Sciences, (1996 - 1999)

• Ontario Early Researcher Award, 2008
• IBM CAS Faculty Fellow, 2006-present
• Nominated for ACM Ph.D. Dissertation Award by Purdue University, 2004
• B.S. with First Degree of Honor (Summa Cum Laude), 1995

• PT1. Amr El-Helw, Ihab F. Ilyas, and Calisto Zuzarte, “Recommending Statistical Views using Cost/Benefit Metrics”, U.S. Patent 7668804, Feb 2010
• PT2. Amr El-Helw, Ihab F. Ilyas, Wing Lau, Volker Markl and Calisto Zuzarte, “Management of Interesting Database Statistics", U.S. Patent 20090018992 A1, Jan. 15, 2009
• PT3. Paul Brown, Peter Haas, Ihab F. Ilyas and Volker Markl, “CORDS: Automatic Discovery of Correlations and Soft Functional Dependencies”, US Patent 20050278357
• PT4. Dengfeng Gao, Ihab F. Ilyas, Eileen Lin, Guy Lohman and Jun Rao, “Estimating Compilation Time of a Query Optimizer”, US Patent 20050071331

• Professional member of the ACM (Association of Computing Machinery) since 2000
• Member of the ACM Special Interest Group on Management of Data SIGMOD since 2000
• Member of IEEE since 2006

• Ph.D. in Computer Science, Purdue University, West Lafayette, 2004
• M.S. in Computer Science, Alexandria University, Egypt, 1999
• B.S. in Computer Science, Alexandria University, Egypt, 1995

• Ihab F. Ilyas and Mohamed A. Soliman, “Probabilistic Ranking Techniques in Relational Databases” , Synthesis Lectures on Data Management, March 2011, 71 pages, Morgan Claypool.

• Ihab F. Ilyas, Davide Martinenghi and Marco Tagliasacchi, “Rank-join Algorithms for Search Computing”, Book Chapter, Search Computing Challenges and Directions, Springer LNCS, Vol. 5950, March 2010.
• Mohamed A. Soliman, Ihab F. Ilyas and Shalev Ben-David, “Supporting Ranking Queries on Uncertain and Incomplete Data”, the VLDB Journal, Volume 19, Number 4, 2010, pp. 477 - 501
• Peter J. Haas, Ihab F. Ilyas, Guy M. Lohman and Volker Markl, “Discovering Statistical Properties for Query Optimization in Relational Database Systems – a Survey”, Statistical Analysis and Data Mining, Volume 1 Issue 4 (March 2009) pp. 223-250
• Mohamed A. Soliman, Ihab F. Ilyas and Kevin C.-C. Chang, “Probabilistic Top-k and Ranking- Aggregate Queries”, ACM Transactions on Database Systems (TODS), Volume 33, Issue 3, Article 13, September 2008, 45 pages

• Mohamed A. Soliman, Ihab F. Ilyas, DavideMartinenghi and Marco Tagliasacchi, ”Ranking with Uncertain Scoring Functions: Semantics and Sensitivity Measures”, to appear in Proceedings of the 2011 ACM SIGMOD Conference on Management of Data, Athens, Greece (23%)
• Mohamed Yakout, Ahmed K. Elmagarmid, Jennifer Neville , Mourad Ouzzani and Ihab F. Ilyas, ”Guided Data Repair”, to appear in Proceedings of the 37th International Conference on Very Large Databases, VLDB 2011, Seattle, Washington, PVLDB 4(5): 279-289 (2011)
• George Beskales, Ihab F. Ilyas, and Lukasz Golab, “Sampling the Repairs of Functional Dependency Violations under Hard Constraints”, in Proceedings of the 36th International Conference on Very Large Databases, VLDB 2010, Singapore, PVLDB 3(1): 197-207 (2010) (16%)