Luis Gravano

Luis Gravano is a Professor of Computer Science at Columbia University, specializing in databases, information retrieval, and web search. He joined Columbia in 1997 and holds a Ph.D. from Stanford University. His research focuses on scalable information extraction, event detection in social media, and applications of machine learning in public health monitoring. Gravano has advised over a dozen Ph.D. students, many of whom now hold prominent roles in academia and tech industries such as Google and Microsoft.

Education: Ph.D. (1997), M.S. (1994) in Computer Science from Stanford University; B.S. (1991) from Escuela Superior Latinoamericana de Informática (ESLAI), Argentina.

Research interests span databases, web search systems, and applying computational methods to public health challenges. Notable projects include extracting health-related insights from Yelp reviews and social media to detect foodborne illnesses and outbreaks. He has also contributed to query optimization for hidden-web databases and time-series clustering algorithms.

Awards include NSF CAREER Award, multiple best-paper awards at SIGMOD and ICDE conferences, and teaching recognitions from Columbia Engineering. Current roles include teaching Advanced Database Systems (COMS E6111) and leading the Columbia University Database Research Group.