Yanlei Diao

Yanlei Diao is a Professor of Computer Science at École Polytechnique (France) with a joint appointment at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She received her PhD from UC Berkeley in 2005. Her research focuses on scalable data systems, particularly in big data analytics, cloud computing optimization, and real-time stream processing.

Research Interests: Her work spans cloud infrastructure optimization (UDAO project), explainable anomaly detection in data streams (EXAD), interactive data exploration (AIDEme), genomic data analysis (GESALL), and uncertain data management (CLARO). She leads the CEDAR team at Inria/LIX focusing on cloud-scale data exploration.

Awards & Honors:

• ERC Consolidator Grant (2017-2023)
• CRA-W Borg Early Career Award (2013)
• NSF CAREER Award (2008)
• Keynote speaker at ACM DEBS 2021 and SWIFT 2023 AI Forum
• Best Paper Award at SIGMOD 2011
• ACM SIGMOD Dissertation Honorable Mention (2005)

Advising & Leadership: Mentored over 20 PhD students and postdocs, currently supervising 7 researchers. Served as PVLDB PC Co-Chair (2025-2026) and ACM SIGMOD Editor-in-Chief (2014-2019). Leads multiple projects with industry partners including Alibaba Cloud.