Rate My Professor Divyakant Agrawal

Divyakant Agrawal is a Distinguished Professor and Chair of the Department of Computer Science at the University of California, Santa Barbara, holding the Leadership Endowed Chair in Computer Science and serving as Director of Engineering Computing Infrastructure. He earned a BE (Hons) in Electrical Engineering from the Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani, India, in 1980, where he received the Gold Medal as top of his graduating class. Agrawal then obtained MS and PhD degrees in Computer Science from the State University of New York at Stony Brook. He has been a faculty member in the UCSB Department of Computer Science since 1998, previously serving as Chair from 1999 to 2003 and resuming the role in 2023. His career includes Visiting Scientist positions at IBM Almaden Research Center in 1993-1994 and 1994, Senior Visiting Research Scientist at NEC Research Laboratories of America from 1997 to 2009, and Visiting Scientist in the Advertising Infrastructure Group at Google from 2013 to 2014. From 2006 to 2007, he was Vice President of Data Solutions and Advertising Systems at ASK.com.

Agrawal's research expertise encompasses database systems, distributed computing, data warehousing, and large-scale information systems. His current focus includes scalable data management and data analysis in cloud computing environments, security and privacy of data in the cloud, and scalable analytics over social networks data and social media. His research group has developed innovative storage architectures in the cloud that provide transactional and strong consistency guarantees for managing big data, along with algorithms to limit misinformation campaigns in social networks, model user adoption behavior, and report dominant information trends in structural and geographical contexts. He has published more than 350 research manuscripts in prestigious journals, conferences, symposia, and workshops on topics related to data management and distributed systems, and has advised more than 35 doctoral students. Agrawal's contributions to the field are evidenced by major awards, including the 2026 ACM SIGMOD Contributions Award for outstanding service through community initiatives and leadership as Chair of ACM SIGMOD from 2021 to 2025, IEEE Fellow (2012), ACM Fellow (2012), ACM Distinguished Scientist (2010), Outstanding Graduate Mentor from UCSB Academic Senate (2011), Best Paper Award at the IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering (2002), and William Mong Fellow at the University of Hong Kong (2012).