Rate My Professor Zhifeng Bao

Professor Zhifeng Bao is a Professor in the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Queensland. He earned his PhD in Computer Science from the National University of Singapore in 2011, receiving the Best PhD Thesis Award as the only winner among 35 graduates from the School of Computing. Prior to joining UQ, Bao was a senior lecturer and Head of the Big Data and Database Group at RMIT University. He holds an Honorary Senior Fellow position at the University of Melbourne. In 2024, he was named an ARC Future Fellow for his project developing an automated data orchestration system to reduce the time, money, and energy required to train high-performing machine learning models. Additionally, he leads an ARC Discovery Project from 2024 to 2027 on scaling disk-resident learned indexes for database systems.

Bao's research focuses on data-centric AI, multimodal data lake management, and machine learning for database systems, encompassing areas such as trajectory data queries, spatial-temporal forecasting, query optimization, and differentially private data processing. He has published extensively in premier venues including Proceedings of the ACM on Management of Data, IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, and ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology. Key publications include "Practical Parameterized Query Optimization via Efficient Plan Reuse and List-wise Ranking" (2026), "Lemo: A Cache-Enhanced Learned Optimizer for Concurrent Queries" (2023), "Efficient and Effective Algorithms for Generalized Densest Subgraph Discovery" (2023), "A Survey on Advancing the DBMS Query Optimizer: Cardinality Estimation, Cost Model, and Plan Enumeration" (2021), and "Efficient mining of outlying sequence patterns for analyzing outlierness of sequence data" (2020). His scholarship has accumulated over 6,000 citations. Notable honors include the Chris Wallace Award for Outstanding Research (2021) from the Computing Research and Education Association of Australasia, Google Faculty Research Awards (2015 and 2018), Best Paper Runner-up at ACM KDD 2019, and multiple distinguished service awards such as Senior PC Award at EDBT 2024 and Associate Editor Awards for ACM SIGMOD and PVLDB.