Lei Cao

Lei Cao is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Computer Science, University of Arizona, with research affiliations at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and former roles at IBM T.J. Watson Research Center. Holding a Ph.D. from Worcester Polytechnic Institute, his work focuses on synergies between data systems and machine learning, emphasizing Scalable, Automatic, and Human-in-the-loop (SAUL) properties.

• Affiliations: University of Arizona (current), MIT CSAIL (research), IBM T.J. Watson Research Center (former).
• Research Focus: Systems for AI, AI for Systems, cloud data infrastructure, and database performance optimization.

He collaborates with Prof. Samuel Madden, Prof. Michael Stonebraker, Prof. Tim Kraska, and Dr. Michael Cafarella, bridging low-level database optimization with high-level machine learning applications.